“A place in the sun” refers to multiple and reoccurring themes in my work, including Australian post-colonial identity and migration; refugee migration; the gap between the projected and the actual; the cultural hegemony of mining and energy companies; and the impact on the environment as we produce and produce and consume and consume in search of an ever receding and ideal ‘place in the sun’. 

A lot of my work is about the small everyday things that I find absurd. The ubiquity of representational images on objects such as throw-away plastic lids, for example. We are being sold something at every moment, and in this instance we are being sold an unconscious conflation of the “cast away” of a throw-away plastic lid with the “cast away” of an island paradise via an image of palm trees.

Indeed, perhaps the pacific islands of the future will be drifting accumulations of all the plastic waste swirling around the oceans of the world, and entire landscapes will be made of packaging materials.

I work by using arrangements of found objects to create environmental, psychological or political space. I am interested in how objects and the readymade illustrations on objects can be reused as spatial elements in a photograph, and how they can interact to make an image with its own visual coherence and narrative. My aim is not to construct a technically sophisticated photograph of an object as it stands in the real world, but to create a visual/conceptual illusion that enables the objects to create a new world of their own. 

Elaine Campaner 2012