Polixeni Papapetrou: " Between Worlds "

It was in discovering a work of Diane Arbus that Australian photographer Polixeni Papapetrou felt her first great emotion in photography. Inspired by childhood and by her own childhood in Melbourne where she was born and lives now, Papapetrou draws us into a poetic world, surreal and dreamlike. A world where the influence of literature, with the inclusion of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, reinforces her contentions in the matter of childhood. Childhood, adolescence, the passage between the world of childhood to maturity is at the heart of her photographs. It reminds us that children and adults do not live in the same imaginary worlds.

In her 2009 series " Between Worlds," Polixeni Papapetrou has photographed children acting as animals in the landscape. The children wear animal masks, allowing them to inhabit an intermediary position that separates them from adults and human from animal. In performances dramatized by costumes and masks, and in breathtaking landscapes, the children as animals dance upon their own liminal world between fantasy and theatre, mythology and reality, archetype and free play, male and female, child and adult, and last animal and human.

The Debutants

The Ambassadors

The Harvesters

The Pastoralists

The Players

The Reader

The Loners

The Wanderer

The Caretaker

The Provider

The Watcher

The Digger

Courtesy Polixeni Papapetrou
"Between Worlds" is currently on view at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney

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