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Taking its bearings from the adage that seeing is believing, the debut book from young Melbourne photographer Sarah Walker, Second Sight, assumes a cynical vantage on our collective relationship with spirituality, faith, ritual and the search for meaning. Utilising the trickery of photography, Walker reframes and appropriates fragments of the everyday to imbue them with the loaded atmosphere of the ephemeral and the arcane. The resulting body of work proves as speculative and enigmatic as it is arresting and dynamic – a space where the image of refracted light, moving water or birds in flight becomes a foil for arcing bodily gestures, clasped hands, arrangements of rocks and abstracted, deconstructed portraiture. Here, we find ourselves enmeshed in the artifice of this fraught search for meaning, where each and every instance becomes a potential sign.

“Photography itself is ritualistic and performative, and at times requires repetitive action to achieve its intended results,” writes the artist. “It has a creator.” As such, Walker posits her photographic practice to operate in a kind of unlikely parallel to that of spiritual practices. “Similar to those who project meaning onto refracted light, this body of work re-contextualises and uses the connection between images to depict a new grasp on reality. My own spiritual space.”

Sarah Walker (b. 1991) is a photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. Her work includes the use of found imagery, video and sculptural works. She is interested in using photography to deconstruct reality and examine ideas relating to the human condition. Walker’s work has featured in various publications including Der Greif Guest-Room curated by Jörg Colberg, Phases Magazine, The Heavy Collective, The Latent Image, Terra Firma and the book A Place Both Wonderful and Strange (Fuego Books, Murcia). She has exhibited in Australia and abroad.