Aishah Kenton currently lives in Canberra, Australia; she was born in Singapore and grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Aishah graduated from the Australian National University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2018, where she majored in photography at the School of Art and Design. Aishah’s work utilises everyday opportunities from her own environment to make photographs; her work is instinctual and respondent, yet clearly thought out and well considered. Aishah finds inspiration from photographers and artists who work with subjects they know intimately, from which they endeavour to communicate something universal. In 2018 Aishah was awarded an Emerging Artist Support Scheme Award for her graduating exhibition ‘To Whom it May Concern’ from Goulburn Regional Gallery and the gallery will exhibit Aishah’s most recent body of work ‘Second Exit’ in 2019. Aishah has exhibited her photographs at TPR Gallery in Canberra and was a finalist in the 2017 Maggie Diaz Photography Prize for Women.
Second Exit
Second Exit explores the unique power of the photographic image; an artist reaching for the elusive present, framing it within an ambiguous sense of the past. Having worked in black and white over the past three years, Aishah Kenton’s new series celebrates the richness of colour found across regional and remote areas of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland.
Kenton explores the world as she sees and feels it, often including her husband in the photographs she makes. While Second Exit speaks of an unfamiliar environment to the artist – that of outback Australia – Kenton is acutely aware that her subjects inherently speak through the medium of photography.
A diary filled with visual explorations of colour and intrigue, Second Exit will long be associated with Kenton’s first visit into the Australian interior. The artist’s photographs are the results of her own visual investigations, her fixed lens showing things as they are; unromantic and sparse, loving and full of life.
To view more of Aishah Kenton’s work please visit her website.