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[av_heading heading=’Honey Long and Prue Stent: Bodies of Work’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote modern-centered’ subheading_active=” show_icon=” icon=’ue800′ font=” size=” av-medium-font-size-title=” av-small-font-size-title=” av-mini-font-size-title=” subheading_size=’15’ av-medium-font-size=” av-small-font-size=” av-mini-font-size=” icon_size=” av-medium-font-size-1=” av-small-font-size-1=” av-mini-font-size-1=” color=” custom_font=” subheading_color=” seperator_color=” icon_color=” margin=” margin_sync=’true’ padding=’10’ icon_padding=’10’ headline_padding=” headline_padding_sync=’true’ link=’manually,http://’ link_target=” id=” custom_class=” template_class=” av_uid=’av-l3e05b38′ sc_version=’1.0′ admin_preview_bg=”][/av_heading]
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The highly experimental practice of artist duo Honey Long and Prue Stent captures the slippery nature of representation. Rose of Sharon Leake writes.
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Honey Long and Prue Stent have worked creatively together for 15 years, since they became friends in year eight of high school. Through this time, they have navigated the trials and tribulations of adolescence and the steps to womanhood with a sense of playfulness, working together and experimenting in a fun and inquisitive space; a space with no borders.
Now, six years after their first solo show, their expanded photographic practice remains grounded in experimentation, yet their final results – clean, considered, intelligent – are telling of the many years they have worked side by side.
“We take heaps of photos but don’t overthink it too much,” says Stent. “It’s very much like playing or experimenting… and then it’s quite quick, that process where things align and everything makes sense.”
Completing a residency at Hill End in 2021; being selected by the City of Sydney for Site Works which saw their work line scaffolding in Sydney’s CBD; nabbing a finalist place in the Bowness Photography Prize in 2020; included in a group show at Fotografiska, New York which is currently touring; and with an upcoming commission for Moreland Council, their work is widely recognised. With works exploring such intimate expressions of selfhood, femininity and the body, it might seem at odds to present their photographs in such a public manner. Yet in our current social climate it is exactly this juxtaposition that renders their work relevance and power.
Documenting interactions between bodies, materials and landscapes, Long and Stent seek to capture a feeling, the familiar yet almost grotesque material-clad bodies simultaneously conjure reality and fantasy.
“I think there’s this feeling of the body becoming a conduit,” says Long. “It’s those moments – when the body kind of melts or there’s this feeling of weightlessness or suspension where there’s an empathetic feeling in the work, where the body is responding with feeling to a set of circumstances and situations. When you’re submerged in a particular element, and there’s something of that material, or there’s something of that element in the gesture and expression of the body, and those things are blending together; they’re the moments that interest us.”
While previous bodies of work have been photographed in an array of different landscapes (some shoots even taking place on the sides of highways) their latest body of work, The Land of Milk and Honey, saw the duo construct landscapes in their own backyards. With Covid-19 imposed travel restrictions hindering road trips and site visits over the last two years, Stent and Long had to find new ways of working within a constrained set of circumstances. “Gardens are such fertile territories for symbolic associations as well as sensorial experiences and we wanted the work to feel like a space which could be explored or experienced in the same way you would a garden,” they say. “Doing the work in the backyard just made us realise how impossible it is to recreate [landscapes], because there’s just so many different ingredients in a situation that make it work: the sun, the water, all the different particles and soils in that water.” The feeling of containment and isolation in the resulting works mirror those felt by Long and Stent at the time of creation.
This feeling seeps through in the artists’ choice of materials also. Where in previous works bodies are wrapped in light, transparent materials, this series sees a shift to latex-like skins which act as scales or armour.
These synthetic materials contrast with some of the more natural elements in the series such as dirt, earth worms, moths and water. Fetishistic and alluring, these materials create a veneer of mystery in the works, sealing off the body behind the material and acting as a container or vessel for the body.
“We wanted to create a space that felt like a meeting point between synthetic, man-made construction and the wild more uncontrollable elements that you get from the natural world,” they say. “The garden is like a meeting point of those two states.”
Focussing on the female body (their own bodies in many works), Long and Stent reveal an interesting dichotomy in their exploration of the female form, which appears both empowered and passive, clothed yet naked, concealed yet exposed. They use their bodies as a kind of sculptural material, a conduit for representation informed by the experience of being a woman. “The female body embodies all of these contradictions,” says Stent, “and when you’re inhabiting one, it’s yours and then it’s also not yours because on a cultural level there’s all these different meanings projected onto it.”
“In terms of the anonymity,” continues Long, “it’s never been about hiding who we are, but I feel like people can feel more connected or can identify more with the images because you don’t have someone’s face, you’re not distracted by that, but you’re thinking about the body in a broader sense. I guess I’d hope that people might rethink the way that they connect or can relate to their environments. But I guess the flip side is that people have in the past thought it to be dehumanising.”
The Land of Milk and Honey, an imagined, constructed place of contradictions and promises both kept and empty, is ultimately a land of play where Long and Stent continue to experiment and be curious about the potential of representation.
Long and Stent’s The Land of Milk and Honey shows at ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne until 4 July.
Featured Image: Artists Honey Long and Prue Stent.Photo:Aaron Claringbold.
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