No Photography Allowed
This year, I’ve had two conceptual art projects for art school that I’ve had to develop from seed words. The first one was tag, from which I created my Note To Self piece that I’m now extending into ceramics and will share more on that process later. The second came from the word, grid.
Project brief: This is a self-directed conceptual piece. It is entirely your choice of media. Brainstorm conceptual ideas around the word GRID. This word lends itself to a series or to repetition. It may be a series of paintings or drawings or prints etc.
In August, I spent a few days at Uluru. One of the guided walks I went on was through the Valley of the Winds at Kata Tjuṯa (aka the Olgas). The walking trail is part of a sacred site belonging to the Anangu people. Apart from being “off the grid”, in terms of there being no mobile reception, there are signs along the trail reminding visitors of the cultural sensitivities of the site, and that they must not take photographs of the rock formations from the interior.
When I received the project brief for “grid”, I thought my experience of this walk was a good opportunity to explore what it means to be entirely present somewhere spectacular, precisely because taking photos is discouraged. I found myself annoyed by the tourists in my group who either failed to understand or blatantly disregarded what our guides had instructed us. But I also found that I looked closer, remembered more, and the fragments of what I could reproduce seemed more vivid.
Given we’d just completed a unit of class work that involved creating concertina books from all the prints we’d produced in the previous unit, I decided to revisit the gel printing to make a larger-scale concertina book. As the idea took more shape, I decided I wanted to make a book cover from the only photo I had of the Olgas—the one I’d taken from the designated area outside the perimeter.
The inside had to be made up from what I could remember, so I got to work making a series of background (the sky and rock formations), mid-ground (the reds of the soils and rocks, and the greens of the mulga bushes and wattle trees), and foreground prints (the greens and ochres of the grasses).
A sheet of A1-sized 130gsm cartridge paper formed into a Turkish map fold would become the foundation for assembling the prints into a pop-up style book. After I assembled it, I hand-painted the flowers into the foreground and added a few other hand-painted touches into the scenery.
Here is the artist statement that went with the piece.
No Photographs Allowed
Medium: photograph and acrylics on paper
30.5cm x 42cm
Aprill Enright
24 October, 2025
This work explores what it means to step off the grid—beyond what can be recorded or accurately reproduced. During a walk through the sacred site of Kata Tjuṯa’s Valley of the Winds, photography of the rock formations was forbidden. That restriction heightened my awareness; memory became my only map. The concertina book pairs my exterior photograph of Kata Tjuṯa with hand painting, and gel prints of the interior, recalling impressions, reflecting on sanctity, memory, and what we may lose sight of altogether if the camera roll doesn’t stay closed.
The following video shows the scale of the book when it’s opened up.
And, as expected, I ended up with a lot of leftover prints, so I made a board book as a companion piece with some of the background textures and photographs of the wildflowers that I’d taken. It gave me an opportunity to show the photographs of the wildflowers that I hand-painted in the pop-up book, while also playing with the range of colours and textures that had been left out.
I don’t love finicky manual labour, and these books require it, so I feel like I set myself a painful challenge, but they worked out well and the feedback from the teachers was great. My effort was rewarded.