Miriam Charlie’s first major exhibition with enlarged Polaroids marks a profound step in her practice — expanding the scale of a medium often held close, intimate, and fleeting. In these works, what was once hand-sized now stretches into presence, carrying the weight of story, memory, and return.
Tracing her journey back to Borroloola, her homeland in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Charlie’s photographs map not only the physical road home, but the emotional terrain of reconnection to Country. Each image is a fragment of travel — the shifting skies, the rhythm of bitumen and dirt, the quiet signs and symbols that chart the way north. Together, they form a portrait of belonging: tender, luminous, and deeply personal.
By enlarging the Polaroid, Charlie transforms the private into the monumental, making visible the strength of her return to Country and the ongoing pulse of her community. These works invite us to witness the act of going home — and the profound ways that place and identity are carried in image.
Artwork:
Miriam Charlie
Elmasri, 2022
polaroid reproduction print on archival cotton rag
106 x 88.3 cm
edition of 5 + 2 AP
