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Miriam Charlie: Getting to Borroloola.
N.Smith Gallery, 25 September – 11 October

Miriam Charlie: Getting to Borroloola.: N.Smith Gallery

Past viewing_room
  • ‘These photos capture me getting back to my Country after time spent in Covid isolation. I wanted to document how it felt being free again – and reconnecting with my family and Country.’ - Miriam Charlie
     
     
    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.
    • Miriam Charlie Getting to Borroloola, 2025 11 polaroid photographs with handwritten notes 10.8 x 8.8 cm (each) Acquired by museum
      Miriam Charlie
      Getting to Borroloola, 2025
      11 polaroid photographs with handwritten notes
      10.8 x 8.8 cm (each)

      Acquired by museum
  • 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.
  • Miriam Charlie, Getting to Borroloola, 2022 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Miriam Charlie, Orazio in the Phone Booth, 2022 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Miriam Charlie, Travelling down the Carpentaria HW, 2022 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Miriam Charlie, Elmasri, 2022 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Miriam Charlie, B. Jump up, 2022 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Miriam Charlie, Elmasri down the river, 2022 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Miriam Charlie, Travelling on the Carpentaria HW, 2022 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Miriam Charlie, Carpentaria, 2022 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Miriam Charlie, Will and his assistant, 2022 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Miriam Charlie, Orazio Darey my Grandson, 2022 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Miriam Charlie, Untitled III, 2022 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Miriam Charlie, Getting to Borroloola, 2022
    Enquire.
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  • 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.
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  • Bio.
    Artists

    Bio.

    Miriam Charlie’s photographs show the reality of her community and her Country in a form traversing documentary and art photography.

    A proud Garrwa / Yanyuwa woman, Miriam Charlie has lived her entire life in Borroloola, 1,000 kilometres south east of Darwin, documenting community life with a Polaroid camera. The intimacy of her photos is reminiscent of our own family photographs, reframing the experience of life in a remote community through the lens of compassion, dignity and respect. This low-fi technology removes the need for bulky equipment and editing, retaining complete agency over her projects. 

     

    Miriam is telling a contemporary, remote community story through her unique perceptive, representing a turning point in documentary photography. Each polaroid is an individual object - not to be replicated but original and unique with Miriam’s handwritten notes.

     

    Join Miriam’s preview list / Find out more.

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