The Quickening explores the transformation and lived experience of a woman in her motherhood/matrescence and postpartum depression/anxiety. The work interrogates the under-represented transition of biological, psychological and social identity during a complex and yet ubiquitous phase of life.

You begin your life in expansion. From rolling to crawling to walking, your reach moves outwards from infancy through to adulthood. At the cusp of motherhood, everything instantaneously moves in reverse. Your world begins to shrink, to coalesce into the tight sphere of domestic life. What was once the sun is now the light in your living room. What was once the road, becomes the hallway to the bathroom. Everyone you once knew, becomes the squalling baby in your arms, suddenly unknowable, inconsolable and opaque in their needs and wants. As the external landscape of your old world shifts from mountains to lakes, the change also begins within. In increments and then suddenly faster and faster, you become internally unrecognizable. The task of navigating this new geography, the new days and nights, how you eat, how you sleep, how you love - this seismic transition - is called “matresence”.

The Quickening details the claustrophobia, myopia, paradoxical loneliness and luminance of this transformative time.

Finalist for the Vevey Images Grand Prix for 2019

Julia Margaret Cameron Award Honorable Mention for 2019

Solo exhibition at Rencontres d'Arles 2019

Winner of the BIFA Documentary Photo Book Prize 2020

Finalist for the Lucie Foundation Photo Book Prize 2020

Finalist for the Perimeter x PHOTO 2021 International Photobook Prize

ONLINE / FREE / TALK

Photo Live: Ying Ang

Date 13.10.2021
Time 10:00am (GMT), 8:00pm (AEDT)
Location Online
Date: 13.10.2021 Time: 10:00am (GMT)
Date: 13.10.2021 Time: 8:00pm (AEDT)

Presented by Photo Australia, Melbourne (www.photo.org.au) and Autograph, London (www.autograph.org.uk), PHOTO LIVE is a series of 10 online conversations between artists and curators from Australia and the UK that will explore ideas of identity and belonging in the context of human rights, representation and social justice. This program highlights the importance of centring black, Indigenous, feminist, queer and other marginalised voices and storytelling in photography.

About the Artist

The seventh talk in the series features Ying Ang, an established Melbourne-based photographer and author with an extensive international exhibition history. She has worked with publications including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time and Vice. She graduated as valedictorian in the 2009-2010 class of Documentary Photography and Photojournalism at The International Centre of Photography, with a subsequent award and portfolio acquisition for the permanent collection of the Sagamihara City Museum in Japan. She was featured in “FIRECRACKERS: Female Photographers Now”, a showcase of contemporary female documentary photographers published by Thames & Hudson, and “How We See: Photobooks By Women”, featuring one hundred 21st-century photobooks by women photographers published by 10×10 Photobooks.

Her latest work, The Quickening, explores the transformation and lived experience of a woman in her motherhood/matrescence and postpartum depression/anxiety. The work interrogates the under-represented transition of biological, psychological and social identity during a complex and yet ubiquitous phase of life.

Photo Australia produces PHOTO International Festival of Photography in Melbourne and across regional Victoria. Delivered in collaboration with over 40 cultural institutions, museums, galleries and universities, the Festival features free exhibitions, outdoor displays and artist commissions, alongside events and education programs. The Festival invites artists, curators, writers, academics and audiences to interrogate the major issues of our time through a central theme. The theme for PHOTO 2022 is ‘Being Human’ and the Festival will run from 29 April to 22 May 2022.

Autograph ABP was founded in 1988 in London to support black photographic practices. Between 1988 and 2007, Autograph worked as an agency to initiate projects in gallery spaces, museums, at festivals or in public sites. It developed expertise in influencing policy and practice and was able to demonstrate alternative models of making and sharing creative work produced by artists from the UK and abroad. In 2007, Autograph applied for charitable status and moved to a purpose-built permanent home in Rivington Place, Shoreditch, which provides an important London showcase for its annual public exhibitions, a dedicated learning studio and a place to welcome the many institutions, informal groups and individuals with whom we make and share cultural projects.

1854 Media is a multi-award-winning digital media organisation with a global community including millions of photographers, arts lovers and international brands. Its portfolio includes British Journal of Photography, the world’s oldest photography title (est. 1854), and its awards are among the most viewed photographic exhibitions in history.