Visual Studies / 007

Body & Gesture

Melbourne, Sydney and New York City

2022–2025

A Lungful of Air

How substances shape the atmosphere of the city and the psyche of its inhabitants

A Lungful of Air follows the brief clouds produced when people smoke, inhale and exhale in public. Against concrete, glass and crowded streets, breath becomes visible. Each plume marks a pause while also altering the space around it.

The photographs move between cigarettes, cannabis and other forms of inhalation without treating them as equivalent in cause or consequence. What connects them visually is the gesture: a substance enters the body, the body releases it, and an internal state becomes public weather. The work stays with the tension between appetite and restraint, pleasure and dependency, solitude and performance.

Rather than moralizing about the people pictured, the series asks what these small rituals make visible. A drag interrupts the city’s pace. An exhalation briefly occupies shared air. What disappears almost immediately leaves behind a picture of how bodies negotiate pressure, desire and permission in public space.

  • Hair

    Hair

    Hair explored as a site where personal identity intersects with public space.

  • Oral Fixation

    Oral Fixation

    A photographic study of people of all ages touching their mouths, tracing a small, often unconscious gesture repeated across public life.

  • Intimate Intervention

    Intimate Intervention

    Gestures of touch transforming shared environments into sites of intimacy.

  • Nailshop

    Nailshop

    Fingernails as bodily edges where grooming, self-fashioning and social judgment meet.

  • Earworm

    Earworm

    Exploring intimacy through ear-touching and whispering.

  • The Lover

    The Lover

    Love, desire, romance, and vulnerability flowing through the city.