Gabrielle Bates // Greenway Unknowns

Sticky, tricky entities are all around, inviting “human” surrender so we may dance among new assemblages of Everything Aliveness.

Gabrielle Bates

Greenway Unknowns is a daring photomedia project captained by acclaimed inner west artist Gabrielle Bates. The premise behind the project centres of visualising the “shy monsters, stoic guardians and magical spirits” that share our world – their world, perhaps – and in doing so uncovering the hidden secrets of the Greenway.

Bates fabricates intricately delicate masks and costumes that capture an otherworldliness yet are born of the rich fabric of our world, an allegory perhaps, for excessive human consumption and the natural attrition of the physical world we consume as a result. Each creature is born into the Greenway, with the audience invited to pose for mise-en-scene photos that allude to more-than-human worlds and ways of being.

“Gabrielle works with volunteer participants, handmade dress-ups and performative techniques to coax the entities into the open, one photoshoot at a time. Little or no planning goes into the shoots which Gabrielle conducts using specific negotiations and ritual processes. The participants are often unknown to her, and each costume is randomly assembled from whatever items happen to be around. Creative post-production is an additional transformative tool Gabrielle uses to emphasise the emotional and relational dynamics she perceives during shoots, and the images are finally revealed as paste-ups close to their site of origin.”