Hills Hoist is a photographic installation exploring love – for family, the land and a disappearing way of life in Poland. The project began with a single image: an old suburban backyard clothesline I encountered after migrating to Australia in 2009. Rusty, noisy and rotating in the wind, this oddly domestic object evoked memories of my rural childhood and came to symbolise the emotional tension between past and present, and between two places I call home.
Having grown up in rural Poland during the communist and post-communist eras, my understanding of home, history, tradition, landscape and shared space differs from that of Australian suburbia. Since moving to Australia, I have become fascinated by the Australian backyard as a cultural symbol and by familiar domestic objects, such as the Hills Hoist, that can appear ordinary to one person and can reveal the strangeness of suburban life to another.
Working across digital and analogue photography, installation and alternative processes such as cyanotype, I explore the everyday landscape as a site of memory, nostalgia and cultural translation. Over two years, I documented my family’s daily life in rural Poland under increasing economic and existential pressures. The project culminated in a 2025 residency in Poland, where I collaborated with my sister to create a series of cyanotype textile works incorporating our family archive, including photographs dating back more than 100 years.
At its heart, Hills Hoist is also about love, longing and the universal childhood memories that connect us across cultures and places. By bringing together rural photographs from Poland and Australia, I consider the similarities and differences between these landscapes and how they shape my sense of belonging, identity and memory. Open fields, gardens, old family homes, close-knit communities and everyday farm life – familiar details of my childhood — are largely absent from my current urban life, yet I continue to search for their echoes in the Australian landscape.
Through these connections, the work considers how landscapes carry traces of the past and how memory travels with us as places and ways of life change. A reflection on belonging, ambiguous loss, and the emotional weight of migration, this body of work is a quiet act of determination – to preserve identity, memory, and tradition across distance and time.
Solo Exhibition:
12 November – 7 December 2025
City Library Gallery, 253 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
Group exhibition: Summer Haze Curated by Satellite Projects
2 February – 29 March 2026 T3, 36 Wellington St, Collingwood
Carolyn Cardinet | Gala Jane | Aldona Kmieć | Brigita Lastauskaite
Supported by
