Leah King-Smith

Leah King-Smith is an indigenous Australian photographer best known for her photo compositions. Her 1991 series Patterns of Connection is widely recognised and has been exhibited both in Australia and overseas. King Smith’s work was exhibited in ‘The Thousand Mile Stare: A Photographic Exhibition’^[1] at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Her early work mainly explored the ideas of identity and how it can shift throughout time.^[2]

Early life

Leah King-Smith was born in Gympie, Queensland in 1956.^[3] Having an indigenous mother and a white father with families both against the bond, stirred an interest in King-Smith to explore issues concerning cultural discord in her photography.

Education

In 1986, Leah King-Smith completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in Photography, at Victoria College in Melbourne. King-Smith went on to complete a Master of Arts by research at the Queensland University of Technology in 2001 before graduating from the same university with a PhD in visual arts in 2006.^[4]

Photography career

King-Smith's works were exhibited in The Thousand Mile Stare: A Photographic Exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne in 1988.

Leah King-Smith's Patterns of Connection (1991) was exhibited at the Victorian Centre of Photography, Melbourne and the Australian Centre of Photography, Sydney in 1992. King-Smith is most well known for this series, Patterns of Connection, which began when she was presented with two grants by the Stegley Foundation.^[5] The grant was given through the Koori Oral History Program for King-Smith to make a picture book of hundred photographs for the nineteenth-century Aboriginal people, which were taken by European photographers. However, the project took a different turn as King-Smith felt so moved by the portraits, she felt the need to make it more personally engaging. King-Smith decided to go about this by creating "photo-compositions", which are artworks that combine the photographs from the nineteenth century with her own photographs in colour of the Victorian landscape and paint.^[6] This new turn in the project repositioned Aboriginal people to be seen in a more positive light and in a spiritual and living domain. Landscape and figure were brought together in these works to showcase how important landscape is to the Aboriginal people, in addition to removing the negative connotations of confinement and control presented in the original photographs.^[7]

Duncan King-Smith (Leah King-Smith's partner) is a sound designer who accompanied the works with a soundscape recording of the Australian bush, which was used to create a more engaging experience. The series was widely exhibited and toured with various exhibitions not only around Australia, but internationally to places such as the United Kingdom and North America.^[8]

In 1998, King-Smith was selected for inclusion in the exhibition "In the Realm of Phantoms – Photographs of the Invisible" at the Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach, Germany.

In 1997 and 1999 she was also selected for inclusion in the exhibitions "Metamorphosis and Beyond Myth - Oltre il Mito", part of the Venice Biennales.

In the lead-up to the 2006 Commonwealth Games (held in Melbourne). King-Smith was given a commission by the National Portrait Gallery to create four portraits. These portraits were to be of indigenous athletes and to be made using King-Smith’s photo-composition technique.

King-Smith was represented by Gabrielle Pizzi Gallery (located in Melbourne) in 2012 whilst she was lecturing at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology.

Her work is held across Australia in many collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, the State Library of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales and other public galleries. Her artworks are also in many private collections, as well as in some international collections.^[9]

References