Lizzie Hall: THE LOST SEA

Platform by Canberra Contemporary, 19 Furneaux St, Forrest ACT 2603
30 May – 8 June 2025

Photography by Stephen Best.

For sales contact Adam Bell info@civicartbureau.com. POA

The Lost Sea roomsheet [PDF]

“To reminisce and gather wool is negative. You have to differentiate between memories. Are you going to them or are they coming to you. If you are going to them, you are wasting time. Nostalgia is not productive. If they come to you, they are the seeds for sculpture.”
Louise Bourgeois

THE LOST SEA

So, this photo appears while I’m looking in boxes for other memories of the dead. Instead I found that dead Sea. Soviet mismanagement of the Aral Sea left a vast, salinised environment where nothing can regenerate. I took the photo when I had just left art school, my father was working there, as part of a remediation effort to try to save what was left.

The image stood for all the lost faces and lost landscapes and the gulf of Time. An image of absence and inexorability.

Barthes referred to it in Camera Lucida as punctum, that aspect of a photograph that wounds and pierces you. He goes on to say: “I know that there exists another punctum…than the ‘detail’. This new puncture, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been).”

THE LOST WIFE

“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of
salt. So it goes.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5.

Lizzie Hall is represented by Civic Art Bureau.