Rory King

Gallery 3

Friday 9 June - Sunday 2 July

Opening Thursday 8 June 2023, 6pm - 8pm

The outlaw tradition - those who live ‘outside the law’ - has a rich and vivid history. In Australia, such bandits are known as bushrangers, immortalised in popular culture, celebrated through folk tales and elevated to a legendary, even mythical status. Equal parts hero and villain, the bushranger is heralded as a champion of freedom, often radical opponents to 19th century British governance and the inequality of the early colonies, turning to violence and thievery to balance the scales. Often working in small gangs or as solitary rouges, the Bushranger lived on the periphery of society, banished to the harsh outback in isolation from the collective pulse of rapidly expanding cities.

What first started as an investigation into the profound role these characters play within Australian culture, quickly evolved into a more personal exploration of isolation and grief as King travelled Australia in search of the spirit of these long lost, but far from forgotten men. Travelling to the far reaches of the Australian deserts and bush, to the opal mining towns of New South Wales and South Australia, this project undertook a radical shift as he tried to reconcile his own feelings and emotional responses to these remote and energised places. Living on the road for weeks on end, King began to imagine the isolation, the silence, and the spaciousness these outlawed convicts must have felt, exiled from regular life and condemned to survival by any means possible.

At its core, Bushranger Blue makes no attempt to paint an accurate narrative of the history of the Australian bushranger, rather it functions as an inquiry into more perennial themes of loneliness, death, and longing. By tracking the spirit of the outcast ranger through historical regions and remote communities of the outback, the images speak of a yearning for deep connection in the face of isolation.

About the Artist

Rory King’s work sits in the hybrid space between documentary practice and personal narratives fleshed out through an evocative and ambiguous visual discourse. Primarily shooting his work in black and white and driven extensively by traditional photographic techniques, King is interested in the the unseen personalities living on the fringes of society and the tensions between nostalgia, melancholia, and the sublime.

King received the National Gallery of Australia Summer Art Scholarship for photography in 2011, was named one of the up-and-coming artists of 2018 by Vogue, Australia and was recently awarded a Full Merit Scholarship by Charcoal Book Club to attend the 2023, Chico Hot Springs Portfolio Review in Montana, USA. He has recently published his debut monograph, ‘Plumwood’ (2022) with Tall Poppy Press. He has shown strongly across his early career in solo and group exhibitions, including ‘Burnt Fingers, Broken Nose’, Huw Davies Gallery, PhotoAccess (2018), ’Soul & Mortar / Art! Not Apart’, Nishi Gallery, (2019) and the at the Australian Photography Awards 'STORIES' Exhibition (2020).

King graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in Photomedia at National Art School in 2017.