MAPH AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY
Venus2013 (a past winner)
‘Venus’ (2013) forms part of Petrina Hicks’s series, The shadows, which is made up of 11 images. The series is typical of Hicks’s practice in that it uses portraiture and symbolism to deal with ideas of beauty, representation and the history of art. Like many of her photographs, ‘Venus’ is an unconventional portrait. It shows a young female model covering her face with a large conch shell, which Hicks uses as a symbol to critique the representation of women in art history and culture. For Hicks, the conch shell is a cross-cultural symbol of fertility, and her portrait references some of the earliest images of women, which often communicate ideas of fertility and childbirth.
The spiral formation of the conch shell not only symbolises fertility and female sexuality but also alludes to the Fibonacci sequence as it appears in nature. This mathematical sequence forms the basis of the golden mean, which, through the application of its proportions, has been used to explain perceptions of beauty in the human face.
With this work, Hicks won the 2014 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize.
