SPECIAL EDITION
Perimeter Editions and the artist are producing a special edition of 30 copies, which includes a signed and editioned print (shown in the last image).
Black Sun, 2025
21 x 29.7 cm, printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Many would associate the work of Australian artist Zoë Croggon with the poetics of form, gesture, and the kinetic body. In a career spanning a decade and a half, her photo collages, magazine sculptures, and drawing-based works have envisioned a kind of rich, unknowable choreography – a volley between the body in motion, architectural form, and poignantly economical gestures of hand and material.
Less obvious, though equally as important, has been her work’s grounding in deep research and literature, as her 2024 book How to Cut an Orange (Perimeter Editions) – with its poetic collaborations with renowned writers Samantha Abdy and Alison Croggon (Zoë’s mother) – evidenced so lucidly. As Abdy wrote in her expanded essay, Croggon’s work was not the product of research and reference material for its own sake, but rather the aftereffect of a gaze turned outward, grappling with the notion of being ‘a spectator in the world’ and ‘having a body in the world’.
Her new artist’s book Cold Windows – Croggon’s third publication with Perimeter Editions – takes this dialectic one step further. Comprising two interwoven series made using contemporary technologies of surveillance, this work places the intimacy and autonomy of the body centre-stage in the insidious contemporary condition of the ever-present, all-seeing camera. A series of diptychs titled Asleep on Watch features found images juxtaposed against photographs made using a domestic drone, creating alternate realities that question our own ability to clearly decipher and perceive. Fragments from an essay by Australian poet and author John Kinsella expand on these pairings, while works from the associated series half life form a kind of thematic counterpoint. Comprising stills taken from sixteen security cameras at the artist’s workplace, the series forms an oblique take on the self-portrait, with the artist captured at work and conscious play – intermittently surveilled and performing for the rolling security feed.
A text by the French filmmaker Éléonore Weber – known for There will be no more night, her documentary on military thermal cameras and their dehumanising implications – becomes an anchor amidst the ghostly flow of images. She describes a sinister ‘hallucination’ created by such surveillance technology. ‘The cameras hallucinate as if, in trying too hard to penetrate reality, they can’t help but become delirious,’ she writes, ‘thus making reality inaccessible.’ Cold Windows exists in such a space. Here, Croggon grasps at where bodily autonomy and privacy end, and where the voracious delusion of the contemporary, recorded public begins.
48 pages, 17 x 24 cm, cahier bound softcover, Perimeter Editions (Naarm / Melbourne).