Hybrid : Seeds of Change

Juliana Swatko's love of colour and nature is the focus of these beautifully layered panoramic photographs. Like a scientist or a gardener grafting plants together to create new varietals - or hybrids - the photographs graft together plants and flowers in unexpected ways, transforming them into a visual tableaux, familiar yet extraordinary. The photographs were all taken at the three different Botanic Garden sites of Sydney: The Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney; The Australian Botanic Garden, Mount Annan; and The Blue Mountains Botanic Garden, Mount Tomah, plus a selection taken at Everglades in Leura, Blue Mountains" one of Australia's foremost heritage gardens. The photographs are all made with a low tech plastic Holga camera with medium format colour film as the image capture method. The analog film was scanned and then multiple exposures were digitally layered over each other, reconstructed and manipulated, to create these richly coloured and superbly beautiful panoramic photographs.