Lens-based artist Peta Duncan joins Vanessa Morris on Banksia to talk about We Built a House Out of Water.

We Built a House Out of Water presents a new body of work created through lens-based image-making, layered material experimentation and creating an expressive intimate space that mirrors an internal landscape. Shaped by culture, family and memory, through the ongoing process of healing.

Peta spoke about developing the works through materials, such as a the photographic printing process to metaphors such as the healing power or water and the ocean, and how the name We Built a House Out of Water stems from childhood memories and connects to one of the key themes of play.

The centre of the work is the complex role of Christianity within Torres Strait communities — understood simultaneously as a source of care, protection, and belonging, and as an ongoing colonial force. Rather than offering resolution, We Built a House Out of Water sits within these contradictions, tracing how inherited belief systems are carried through families and reshaped across generations.

Peta also spoke about previous exhibition Until The Tides Take Me Home connecting to visiting her ancestral island of Mer in the Torres Strait and shortfilm BAKIAMU which recognise the shifts in weather patterns and how this has a chain reaction effect disrupting ecological systems and cultural knowledge.

Peta Duncan is a self-taught, emerging lens-based artist using alternative print making processes. Her work is both an exploration of her identity and a love letter to her culture and community. Through Peta’s work, she intertwines and lays bare complex familial relationships, and the juxtapositions of embedding cultural practice in different contemporary photographic mediums and approaches.

This exhibition is presented in partnerships with Blak Dot Gallery and Centre for Contemporary photography.

Learn more about Peta's work here

We Built A House Out Of Water is Blak Dot from 6 - 28 June

BAKIAMU is screening Brunswick Picture House with a Q&A on 8 July from 2 - 4pm