Women in Trees Kristen K Fox Ballarat International Foto Biennale

Open Program 23 August–19 October 2025
Women in Trees
Kristen K Fox Campana's Stockade Cellars

Kristen K. Fox’s exhibition, part of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, presents black-and-white photographs pasted on the exterior wall of Campagna’s Stockade Cellars, a familiar Ballarat landmark. Although adopting the format of street posters, the works function as fine art, offering a sustained meditation on presence, environment, and agency.

The project invites women and non-binary participants into trees, asking them to inhabit a moment of stillness and reflection. In the resulting images, subjects occupy distinct positions of strength: some are absorbed in introspection, some return the camera’s gaze, and others appear in direct exchange with their surroundings. Fox employs a refined use of the black point to establish depth in the landscape. Importantly, this depth resists the rhetoric of fear that has long marked Western representations of the Australian bush.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, artists such as Frederick McCubbin developed a visual mythology around the bush that emphasised its danger, mystery, and impenetrability. This tradition reinforced an image of pioneering masculinity as protective and resilient, while women were often depicted as vulnerable companions or figures lost in an unforgiving environment. Such works functioned as a cultural propaganda, shaping national identity by centring the male colonial settler as heroic and the female as precarious and vulnerable.

Fox’s Women in Trees project consciously diverges from this lineage. The women and non-binary subjects are not cast as imperilled figures, but as active presences within the landscape. The Australian bush here is neither hostile nor unknowable; it is depicted as a site of quiet negotiation and shared agency between human, environment and the photographer as artist. Fox’s work reframes both portraiture and landscape, presenting the subjects not as symbols of fragility but as individuals engaged in self-definition.