Digital Catalogue: 2024 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award
Torin Ward
b. 2003 Adelaide SA, lives Gold Coast QLD
Nocturne (Chiyoda), 2024
pigment print on photo rag
Image courtesy of the artist © Torin Ward
Artist Statement
How should we respond when traces of the past whisper to us in the present? This is the essential question posed in Nocturne (Chiyoda), a ghostly impression of the Hirakawa moat just north of the ruins where Edo Castle once stood. Here, an illustrious 250-year era of peace was established, during which Japanese society would consolidate many valuable aesthetic and moral principles that are still revered and manifest in the landscape today.
Drawing on one such tradition, the elegant and serene Sumi-e, this work attempts to situate an understanding of art and life, and their mirroring in the vestiges of history.
About the Artist
Torin Ward is a dynamic visual artist and fashion designer living and working in the Yugambeh region (Gold Coast). His work is both a meditation on the embodied role of the photographer or designer, and a series of formal, technical experiments across disciplines.
Ward's critical interests have no hierarchy, often conjugating his ever-unfolding research with personally resonant themes of philosophical inquiry and art as a rite or ritual.
Ward has exhibited alongside emerging talent in photography at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, in its celebrated annual Summer Salon, and is engaged in a collaborative project with slow fashion concept store Chev Lane.
