Fresh Glories takes its title from a quote by the Victorian portrait photographer Julia Margaret Cameron: “My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause.” The tension between the arrested image of the portraits Cameron has produced and the performance of producing them is one of the structural devices in Fresh Glories. Cameron also confessed that she damaged a great deal of table linen with nitrate of silver by placing the wet photographic plates on the table. The dinner plates in Fresh Glories double as photographic plates and many napkins have been soiled in the process of revealing their nascent images.
Another structural device has been borrowed from Catherine the Great. One of her palaces included a portrait gallery containing medallions in low relief of all her royal forebears on one side and, on the other, oil paintings of all the European monarchs ruling in 1775, as a political demonstration of her allegiances and status. The verandah of the National Portrait Gallery provides the ideal hall-like space in which images can hang in opposition to each other and imagined dialogues might occur.
The images themselves come from archival and contemporary sources. The dinner plates reveal a relationship between portrait-makers. The signatures and marks all belong to the white male artists who sought to capture the likeness of Trukanini in the 19th century. Portraits circulating at the end of her life in vast numbers contributed to the erroneous assertion that she was the last Aboriginal Tasmanian.
At the end of [the 20th] century we are similarly flooded with images of prominent citizens, thanks to the portrait-making machines of the print and television media. Politicians are easily framed for our consumption, never as in control of their own image as they would like to be.
[written by Barbara Campbell, performance program, 1997]
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