Interior Landscape: Living Room

Reflection — 3 October 2026

Following my recent experiment photographing the interior of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I decided to apply the same methodology to the much more intimate space of my own living area. What began as an experiment in stitched photography has developed into a consideration of the domestic interior as a Living Archive — a space in which objects, memory, collecting and identity become interconnected.

Following my recent reflection on the stitched photograph I made at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I decided to use the same methodology within the much smaller and more intimate space of my own living area. I used the iPhone to make a series of photographs across the room and then stitched these individual images together to construct a single, expansive view.

Initially, I thought of this primarily as an experiment: what would happen if I took a methodology that had worked successfully within the large public space of an art gallery and applied it to the domestic interior?

The resulting image has surprised me.

It is clearly a photograph of my living room, but I don’t think it functions simply as a record of the room. The stitching has created a field of vision that would be difficult to experience from a single fixed viewpoint. I can see across the room, towards the windows, into the seating area, towards the paintings and ceramics, and across to the cabinet on the right. These viewpoints have been brought together into a single apparently coherent space.

This makes me think about the difference between looking at a room and experiencing a room.

Traditional photographic perspective fixes the camera—and therefore the viewer—at a particular point. In this image the viewpoint is less certain. My eye seems able to travel through the room. In this respect the photograph retains some of the spatial organisation associated with Renaissance perspective—foreground, middle ground, background, overlapping forms and recession—but the stitched construction disrupts the idea of a single privileged viewing position.

This is important because the methodology begins to correspond with the subject of my research. Memory is not experienced from a single fixed position. Neither is collecting, nor perhaps identity. They are assembled from fragments, associations and encounters accumulated over time.

The room itself operates in a similar way.

There are paintings, ceramics, furniture, books, textiles, flowers and collected objects. Some have aesthetic value, some practical value, some have associations with particular people or places, and others have remained with me simply because I enjoy living with them. Together they create relationships that no individual object possesses by itself.

I am increasingly interested in the idea that the objects constitute the interior rather than merely occupy it.

Without these things, this would simply be an architectural space. Through their accumulation and arrangement it becomes my interior.

This brings the photograph directly into my thinking about the Living Archive. An archive need not consist only of documents stored and classified for later retrieval. My domestic environment might itself be understood as an archive: objects are retained, positioned, encountered, moved, used and reconsidered. Their meanings are not fixed. They continue to accumulate associations through the experience of living with them.

This distinguishes the photograph in an interesting way from the earlier Art Gallery of New South Wales image. The gallery is also a collection, but it is an institutional collection. Objects have been selected, classified and displayed within a public space. My living room contains a personal collection embedded within everyday life.

There is therefore an interesting reversal: the gallery collects objects by removing them from everyday life, while the domestic Living Archive collects objects by incorporating them into everyday life.

The image also makes me reconsider still life.

Within the larger photograph are numerous smaller arrangements that could themselves become still lifes: the ceramic vessel beside the window; the objects assembled on the drawers; the blue ceramics beneath the paintings; the books and objects on the tables; the flowers, vase and framed works on the cabinet. The room becomes an expanded still life containing other still lifes within it.

This makes Margaret Olley’s interiors increasingly relevant to me. In Olley’s work the distinction between still life and domestic interior frequently dissolves. Objects, furniture, flowers, paintings and the architecture of the room become interconnected. The domestic environment becomes both lived space and subject.

Joseph Cornell offers another way of considering the image. His boxes bring otherwise separate things into contained spaces where relationships emerge through proximity. Looking at my photograph in this way, the room begins to resemble a Cornell box at architectural scale. The photograph itself provides the container, while cabinets, tables, paintings and architectural divisions create smaller compartments within it.

There is even another contained space at the centre of the photograph: the television is displaying an image of a gallery interior. A room therefore contains an image of another room containing artworks:

room → photograph → screen → gallery → artworks.

Bachelard’s writing about domestic space is also becoming increasingly important here. The home is not simply architecture; it is experienced through intimacy, memory and imagination. This stitched photograph similarly seems less concerned with measuring the room than with describing what inhabiting it might feel like.

Perhaps, then, the term Interior Landscape has a useful ambiguity.

The interior is the physical room, but it might equally describe an interior psychological or autobiographical space.

This raises another possibility within my work as an older gay artist. There is no figure in this photograph, yet I am present everywhere within it. I selected these objects. I collected them, arranged them and chose to continue living with them. I sit in these chairs, handle these books and objects, look at these paintings and move through this space every day.

The photograph may therefore operate as a form of self-portrait without the body.

Rather than representing identity through an image of myself, identity is suggested through accumulation, taste, memory, desire and the relationships I have established between things. The absent body remains present through evidence of inhabitation.

There is also a strong sensual dimension to the image. Wood, leather, ceramic, textile, paper, flowers, glass and paint each possess distinctive surfaces. Photography records those surfaces visually, but my developing interest in photopolymer and à la poupée suggests another transformation. The digital photograph could become plate, ink and paper; an image concerned with material objects could itself become a material object.

The process might therefore become:

lived space → individual photographs → constructed image → plate → ink → paper.

Each transformation introduces another material and another act of interpretation.

What began as an experiment using the methodology of the Art Gallery of New South Wales photograph has therefore opened a much larger possibility. The stitching is not simply a convenient technique for making a panorama. It brings multiple viewpoints, objects and moments together into a constructed whole.

That seems remarkably close to what I am attempting to understand through Landscapes of the Interior: how memory, collecting, objects and lived experience accumulate and become interconnected.

The Interior Landscape may therefore become another way of entering the Living Archive.

Related reflections and work

Collecting the Collection
Landscapes of the Interior — development and still-life photography
The Living Archive
Objects of Desire