Polixeni Papapetrou: photographing Olympia, daughter and muse – in pictures

Over her 20-year career, the Australian photographer Polixeni Papapetrou explored the representation of children and questions of identity. Her daughter Olympia Nelson, now 23, was the main subject of her work and Papapetrou photographed her in fantastical and theatrical settings. Now, a major new retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria draws together Papapetrou’s depictions of her daughter over the years, until the artist’s death from cancer in 2018. Here, Nelson describes the experience of being her mother’s muse and what it was like creating those intriguing and magical works

• Olympia: Photographs by Polixeni Papapetrou is showing at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, until 15 March 2020

Main image: The Debutants (2009), from the series Between Worlds. Photograph: Polixeni Papapetrou

  • Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs (2003), from the Dreamchild series. ‘I remember as a child I had cheeks that were quite rosy, and when this work was criticised in the media, the feedback was that mum had put blush on me. My eyebrows are so dark, my eyelashes are so dark, so some assumed that I’d been made up ... I said when I was 11 that it was my favourite picture that my mother had taken of me and I still hold it true.’
    Olympia as Lewis Carroll's Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs (2003)

  • Dreams Are Like Water (2008), from the series Games of Consequence. ‘I remember hearing all of these perverse comments about my five-year-old body – I was 11 when the controversy erupted. The judgments never really affected me.’
    Dreams Are Like Water (2008)

  • The Wanderer (2009), from the Between Worlds series.
    The Wanderer (2009)

  • Miles from Nowhere (2008), from the Games of Consequence series. ‘Mum bought this banana lounge and we spent hours and hours taking this one picture and nothing worked out. We tried different locations. And then we set up in this exact spot and there was a plane – and Mum loved the plane being there. It was completely coincidental.’
    Miles from Nowhere (2008)

  • Flying Cards (2004), from the Wonderland series.
    Flying Cards (2004)

  • The Holiday Makers (2012), from the series the Dreamkeepers. ‘You look at Mum’s work and think that everything is organised right down to a fastidious detail but, in fact, there’s a lot of chance involved.’
    The Holiday Makers (2012)

  • It’s All About Me (2016), from the series of the same name. ‘These came at a time in my life when I had just finished year 12 and was about to enter uni. I was in this kind of transitional phase ... I was learning and exploring issues of gender, sexuality, feminism, social media; Mum and I had great conversations about social media. So these works are a response to those issues.’
    It’s All About Me (2016)

  • Melancholia (2014), from the series of the same name. ‘Underneath each mask was a lot of pain. In 2012 we were told that Mum had two weeks to live ... It’s really hard to become vulnerable in front of people and so, in masking myself in these works, I’m hiding a lot of the pain that I have to face on the inside. In looking at my mother taking the pictures, I’m also looking at a future without her being there. When we made these, I truly thought that these were the last pictures she would take of me.’
    Melancholia (2014)

  • The Immigrant (2014), from the Lost Psyche series.
    The Immigrant (2014)

  • Blinded (2016), from the Eden series. ‘A little bit before this series, I was reading a lot of poetry – Christina Rossetti was a poet that I really liked. I was studying her for English literature and a lot of the time we would talk about her verses at home. Rossetti also deals with femininity and flowers – it’s actually really beautiful. And so all of these sorts of discussions helped to form this body of work.’
    Blinded (2016)

  • Heart (2016),from the Eden series. ‘What we noticed with these works is that I’m the only model [in my mother’s work] that looks directly into the lens of the camera. I see myself in her and she too saw herself in me. I see my mother taking the picture of me but I also see the future where she will not be there on the other side of the lens.’
    Heart (2016)

  • To(ge)ther (2018), from the series My Heart – Still Full of Her. ‘My Heart – Still Full of Her was an absolutely beautiful body of work to make. This is Mum’s last series. She made this on her deathbed. She made this right down to her last days, really. She lost the ability to walk – because of the way the cancer spread she was paralysed from the waist down and she still wanted to make art. She never stopped. What she did when she could no longer walk was to look back on all the archives of her photographs from the very start of her journey as a photographic artist.’
    To(ge)ther (2018)

  • Giving Birth to Myself (2018), from the series My Heart – Still Full of Her. ‘These are some of the earlier pictures that she took of me where I begin to resemble her – again it’s that whole mirroring of mother and daughter. And this series is all about that: it’s Olympia as Polixeni, Polixeni as Olympia.’
    Giving Birth to Myself (2018)

  • Curtain (2018), from My Heart – Still Full of Her. ‘We had these really transformative moments of being in her room all together – so it would be me; my dad; Stewart Russell, who would print the photos. Even my grandmother. She was there all the time at our house. And we’d spend time looking at which works might look better with silver, which ones might look better with gold, and we’d walk around them and tell Mum while angling the works this way and that – because she couldn’t walk around them – how beautiful it was when the light changes because they had this kind of holographic quality.’
    Curtain (2018)

  • I Am a Camera (2018), from My Heart – Still Full of Her. ‘Very close to the end Mum makes a decision to print in an entirely different way ... in silkscreen over silver or gold. So the works have this beautiful metallic quality. These were really beautiful to make and they constantly brought me back to my own childhood because here I am as a child playing for the camera and then Mum plays with the images so that I become her and she becomes me.’
    I Am a Camera (2018)
Topics