Exhibitions

A Country Practice brings new life to Janina Green’s seminal artist book – of the same title – A Country Practice, animating its pages into an immersive photographic installation that unfolds in chapters—much like the lived passages it draws from. Each section invites viewers into the shifting terrains of memory, migration, and belonging, tracing the contours of a life shaped by arrival, adaptation, and the quiet persistence of looking back.

Green’s story begins in 1949, when she and her mother were among the 75,000 migrants who stepped onto Australian soil in the wake of the end of the Second World War, following Russia’s raid on Easten European countries.

In returning to her Gippsland photo negatives decades later, Janina found herself confronting the landscape that had shaped her—the beauty and burden of rural life, the push and pull between idyll and harshness, and the solitude carved into a woman’s daily experience. These images carry that duality: bucolic and beautiful, rustic and unvarnished, attentive to both the tenderness and severity threaded through country living.

A Country Practice becomes not only a photographic installation but an act of reclamation. It charts what has changed—socially, environmentally, and generationally—and what continues to echo. Through Green’s lens, the past is not fixed; it breathes, expands, and invites us to consider the landscapes we inherit and the selves we grow within them.

Image: Janina Green, Mrs. Naumenko, 2009. C type print, 94 x 75 cm. Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection, purchased in 2011