New Acquisitions

Donna Bailey is a photo-media artist who lives on a rural property outside Kangaroo Flat near Bendigo. Over the last decade she has become well known for taking photographs of her children and other local youth. She fosters a particularly interesting relationship with her young subjects, encouraging them to collaborate in the staging and composition of the images. They discuss wardrobe suggest props and strike their own poses. This approach gives her photographs an edgy aspect, which flickers between a parent collecting memories and children imagining their futures.

The Footballers is a series of photographs that Bailey produced with her son's junior football team, the Quarry Hill Under-12s. In this scenario, each of the boys has posed for an individual portrait as though his mug-shot might appear on a collectable footy-card or in the weekly Football Record. As a team, they beam with ambition and dreams, but Bailey's large-scale prints also capture the vulnerability and individual awkwardness of the boys on their way to becoming men.

– Stephen Zagala, 2011