Trigger

It’s within this entangled terrain that a single photograph—a woman wearing a pearl necklace—becomes the catalyst for a revelation that leads to Anna, my father’s former wife, unknown to me, and to Dimitris, the half-brother I never knew existed.^{The trilogy’s Part II, Nine Years on the Lizard Reef, extends this drift into the Pacific, where coral islands become co-ordinates for a counter‑narrative that resists linearity. Part III, Twelve Islands through a Peephole, turns the gaze towards intergenerational female relationships. Through performative photography with my mother and sisters, the archive becomes a site of negotiation where silence is confronted and where the labour of women mediating my father’s legacy becomes a method of inquiry in its own right.} This archival encounter draws me into the world of the early pearling industry in North-Western Australia, where the Indian Ocean meets the Great Sandy Desert and where I’ve lived for the past four years while completing my practice-led PhD. This coastline, shaped by extraction, indentured labour, shipwrecks, and the violent entanglements of colonial expansion, is also the landscape my father once navigated as a sailor. His archive—photographs, field notes, mollusc specimens—becomes a porous vessel in which the personal and the collective collide. As a daughter, I read these materials as remnants of a man I knew only partially; as an artist, I intervene in them through hybrid photographic processes that embed pearls and archival fragments into the image surface; as a researcher, I situate these gestures within broader histories of oceanic labour, colonial desire, and the politics of archival absence. Each role folds into the others, shaping how I reactivate the archive and how I understand the forces that shape my relation to it.

In this context, the collective histories of pearling don’t sit beside the personal story; they form the conditions through which it becomes legible, revealing how intimate narratives are shaped by larger structures of power, mobility, and erasure. My own encounter with Anna becomes the lens through which the archive’s material and symbolic interpretations unfold, binding the familial to the historical in ways neither sphere can contain alone. Through collage, material interventions and expanded photographic methods, the archive drifts between fact and speculation as well as surface and depth. The images themselves behave like water—fluvial, unsettled, carrying residues of what they can’t fully disclose. The materials I engage with, in turn, don’t only act as critical frameworks but are also generative mediums, prompting new ways of thinking about loss, secrecy, and the unstable ground between evidence and imagination. In this sense, hybrid photography becomes a way of working through the archive as an ocean: a shifting, sedimented body where traces surface and disappear and where the photograph becomes a site of encounter in which research, materiality, and narrative meet in uneasy proximity.