CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS 1: TAMARA DEAN

Tamara Dean is the photographer who provided the cover image for the first edition of the Mary Smokes Boys. Not only is she a great photographer, but a profound thinker and fine writer. Writing a paper on Japanese religio-aesthetics I came across her again ... This from 'Ritualism'





"RITUALISM Ritual is a protocol, a guide, for that most fundamental of human needs: meaning. But when protocol loses meaning, snubbed out by the distractions of life, it is merely repetition. Baptism becomes bath, marriage a party with rings. And so on the Western world ambles, away from what was once the light, out into the secular unknown.

One wonders, in this state, if bath can become baptism – if, on meditation, the mundane can take up meaning and repetition become ritual. This is the margin I seek to explore: the contemporary quest for purpose, rite in the Australian landscape. Ritualism delves into the shared desire to understand our existence and our mortality, the purpose ritual holds in explaining moments of life, to mark them and imbue them with meaning."

---