Amateur Girls

Amateur Girls is a series of work that references the world of commercial glamour and starshot portraits that aim to “reveal the essence of You”. Amateur models, showgirls, hopeful actresses, singers and performers answer the call out in local papers, ‘Models and Performers Wanted’. Interested to find out what attracts them to the advertisement, Emma asks why they want to be in front of the camera and what they had in mind. The models reveal their aspirations to the camera and expose their best attributes. Brochure (Pdf doc)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My World is Now Yours

My World is Now Yours focuses on investigating suburban fantasies. In local newspapers, couples respond to the advertisement ‘Models Wanted to participate in photo shoots’. Attracting the curious, the wannabes and the exhibitionists, these models collaborate with the photographer as they perform for the camera. The couples bring their own agendas to the photographs, the ambiguous and fanciful realms start to emerge. Here role play leads to a performative therapy, allowing the couples to act out each others desires. This is replicated in the video work Private Show, focusing on unscripted performances between takes, couples become absorbed with one another.

The Homemakers

The Homemakers documents the lives of middle-class Sydneysiders living in suburbia. Selecting a particular setting from the subject’s home, the scene captures a moment in their daily lives. As they performed routine activities, the images highlight certain gestures and mannerisms developed from being in a relationship with the same person over a period of time. The work explores the couple’s dreams and desires amongst the banality of daily life, with an almost anthropological approach. "Our expectation that suburban ‘coupledom’ marks the death of authenticity is immediately disrupted in Emma Thomson’s The Homemakers. Relationships which appear to be normal or mundane can mask a darker dynamic which might even been seen as a microcosm of society at large. Relationships can fracture atomistically resulting in two separate narcissistic, selfabsorbed individuals like those suggested in The Entertainers; at the other extreme they can dissolve individual identity into a synchronous unity like that hinted at in The Connoisseurs; suburban respectability can harbour deepseated aggression like that which seems to lurk in Just Another Sunday. Emma Thomson’s images are not judgmental or cynical. They might just as easily be parodying the darker side of relationships. Indeed, playing with such dark themes might itself be part of a fantasy-life. In all of these images, mundane ordinary objects and settings play an important role. They are part of ‘real life’. But when they become props in the fantasy lives of their owners they take on a new significance. They cease to be the ‘dead matter’ of a mere background or setting, and take on a new life and vibrancy. These mundane settings acquire a new significance because they mean something to the couples in terms of their fantasies."
Dr Maurita Harney, 2008, Stranger than Fiction catalogue Brochure (Pdf doc)