Rozalind Drummond (born 1955) is a Melbourne-based Australian artist and academic whose photography, performance and video deals with perceptions of alienation in urban and natural environments in which she stresses the psychology of human gaze and gesture, particularly in the condition of photographing and being photographed.
Education Drummond trained initially at Prahran College 1982-84, an institution which Australian Centre for Photography director Deborah Ely recognised in 1999 as producing "some of the country's most acclaimed practitioners" listing Drummond amongst them, beside "Bill Henson, Carol Jerrems, Steve Lojewski, Janina Green and Christopher Koller". From 1985–86 she undertook a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art at the School of Art in the Victorian College of the Arts where Bill Henson, as noted by Max Dupain, was her supervisor.
In 1997 she was awarded a Samstag Scholarship. Its award of A$30,000 (2025 value: $62,240.00), plus airfares and fees, funded a year of overseas study, during which she took an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London. Co-recipients were Zhong Chen, Lyndal Jefferies, Steven Holland, and Julie Gough.
While studying meantime at Goldsmiths, Drummond was included as one of five Australian artists invited to exhibit at England's Ikon Gallery. The curator, Claire Doherty, writes that a conventional exhibition there of the Australians' work would risk it "appear[ing] without contextualisation, interpretation or dialogue in an alien territory”. Her solution was to have the five artists complete projects both "inside and outside the gallery…over extended periods of time" with local groups and individuals. Drummond responded to this "Art into Action" programme by conducting her project off-site over six months in a local school, filming the idea of 'lost childhood'.
Later in Australia she completed a Master of Arts (Art in Public Space), RMIT University, Melbourne in 2017. Since then she has exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is in major public collections.
Educator 1987–2014 After working 1986-88 as Assistant Director at George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne, Drummond taught in academic positions: as Lecturer in Photography, Victorian College of the Arts, School of Art, Melbourne 1987-89; Lecturer in Photography, School of Art and Design, Monash University, Caulfield Campus 1990-91; and Lecturer in Photography, School of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Burwood Campus until 2014.
Practice Drummond first showed solo in May 1985 at George Paton Gallery (where she was to become assistant director the following year). Gary Catalano remarked on her fixation there with classical antiquity, that her colour photographs of a single draped figure posed against black like a sculpture "belong to what A. D. Coleman has called the directorial mode. Nothing has been left to chance in her carefully arranged images", which were accompanied by a quotation from Goethe on the "profoundly blue" music of antiquity...[a] melancholy which Drummond's text identif[ies] in her allusive images"
Less than ten years into her career, in 1993, Drummond and painter Geoff Lowe were invited by curator Juliana Engberg to produce an exhibition involving collaboration with Vietnamese artists supported by Asialink's Australian art to Asia project and hosted by the Hanoi School of Art, the nation's first contemporary art contact with Vietnam. Choosing to show typical examples of their Australian contemporary art practice, Drummond took long contact proofs—titled Voyeur and excerpted from monochrome Super 8 footage which had been made between 1960–65—which could be unrolled and pinned to the gallery wall either horizontally or vertically, allowing viewers' own interpretation of narrative, and reported that some of the Vietnamese artists were surprised she chose not to frame her photographs.
The exhibition was shown in Australia as Vietnam at the Waverley City Gallery from 25 February to 28 March 1993, in reviewing which Zara Stanhope points to "Drummond's creative acts of framing and filming," and "unsettling juxtaposition of unfamiliar, geographically distant images" which "disrupt the convention of the invisible journalistic photographer [and] Western modes of narrative and brings about reconsideration of viewing responsibilities." Drummond also included a series of untitled black-and-white photos extracted from an unfinished video she made in Vietnam in which scenes in motion were rendered blurred and out of focus. A single framed passport photo facing a group of like images at opposite ends of a long narrow space that for Stanhope signify "the individual made poweriess before structures of the mass or of nation. The passport proves the existence of the refugee and reminds us that those who cross frontiers are, like criminals, the objects ol surveillance."
Drummond's Peeping Tom (named from Michael Powell’s film) was shown at Monash University Gallery, November 1995 to February 1996. Beside found photographs it included three video screens; one showing Powell's 1960 movie; another voyeuristically tracking a woman as she weaves through museum displays; and a third with a live feed of the exhibition space in which the viewer can see themselves recorded. The sum of these parts places the audience in the role of victim and aggressor simultaneously. It is a frequently referenced work, early on by artist and writer Perry Fowler;"Drummond has created an ‘artificial’, cryptically narrated, masculinist subjectivity. Like a psychoanalyst ‘reading’ a patient or a detective investigating a mystery, the viewer deciphers the story through ‘clues’ provided at random.The story reveals an arguably pathological perception of the feminine. Drummond’s women are shallow, monochrome beauties, naively modeling for long-forgotten amateurs. Manipulated and enlarged, they become images of a reconstituted femininity; a postmodern perception of a post-war sexuality."On her own work in the collaborative visual research project "Flows and Catchments" conducted at Lake Bolac over 2012-2014 while she was a lecturer at Deakin University, Drummond concludes that the photograph "offers a momentary pause," an "outline of an image" and acts as a 'signpost':Photography inevitably entails a certain characterization of reality. From being "out there" the world comes to be "inside" photographs, ... [instead] ... I am interested rather in looking, through the viewfinder, to spaces that work the other way, which suggest the potential to locate a "non-space"— where the inside suggests an outside or empty space [...] The viewer may well peer in and look for everything that appears to have been left out. Thus, the photograph becomes a recollection of what Roland Barthes calls "a disruption in the topography" -- we imagine a "beyond" that evokes a sense of melancholy or of irrevocably sliding toward it.
Reception Reviewers recognised an allusive and elliptical gaze in Drummond's oeuvre from early on in her career, with Max Dupainin 1986 describing as "intensely introverted" her imagery in The Melbourne Stage: Photographs by four post-graduates at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney;"Rozalind Drummond shows 16 extremely beautiful colour pictures. As a group they are intensely poetic and charged with a very personal sense of mystery and sometimes unrelenting despair. Subdued yet passionate, delicate and sombre, thought-provoking and slightly awesome, they could all be shifting shadows of the same person. I return to these pictures again and again. In ordinary terminology they have depth. It is heartening to know that photography can thus rise so superior to actuality."Drummond's embrace of postmodernist traits prompted perplexed reviews. Beatrice Faust slighted her contributions to the National Gallery of Victoria's 1988 Excursions into the Postmodern: Five Melbourne Photographers; New Acquisitions, writing that she had failed to make "a coherent body of work," and that beside John Gollings' studies "powerful melding of architectural, pornographic and optical images," hers were "sketchy and trivial."
Juliana Engberg reviewing in Art + Australia, Drummond’s early 1989 Illusion of Plans at City Gallery identifies in her arrangement of apparently disconnected colour photographs "of urban progress — the skyscraper, the bridge, the machinery of production; as well [as] the total view of the city from across the water...identifying the narcissistic impulse of the city to grow and resemble that which it has become." Declaring the intention of the work as to “isolate the viewer's attention by emphasising the product, then to gradually insinuate a further dimension…the group of [urban] planners” and their utopian plans, Engberg notes references to photographers of the Russian revolutionary period and the work of Australian women Olive Cotton and Pat Holmes in the urban domain:So 'Illusion of Plans' becomes a series of dramas — the drama of urban progress as reflected through a modernist plan. The narrative of the planners themselves is locked into the illusion that utopias are still possible and into the narrative of the artist who chooses to participate in the history of her media and its feminine possibilities.Fergus Armstrong wrote in 1991 that: "Rozalind Drummond’s photographic mediation of architectural objects seems to work as if by a principle of wilful indifference. The photographs show a moment of aversion or of 'having-turned-away' which at once sees and erases the rules for living built into the urban environment," concluding that against Bill Henson's "darkly erotic visions of a fallen and benighted world," Drummond's are "a sort of elliptically scientific play-work—a kind of minor theorising with the camera," fleeting and "unconvinced" about the "order of things" but humanely "empathetic".
Canberra Times critic Helen Musa understood, in 1992, that Drummond "uses photography to exploit the distance between the real and the fictional," while Stuart Koop ambiguously qualified such a response in comparing separate 1991 exhibitions by Drummond (Scopic Territories at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art) and Wolfgang Sievers' industrial photographs (at National Gallery of Victoria) to identify her..."...apparently total abdication of authorial responsibility in [ . . . ] a dependence on everything extrinsic to the photograph which has come to characterise the critical import of postmodern photography as some kind of institutional critique; this in contrast to the intrinsic formalism of modern photography," noting "[Sievers'] (perhaps naive) confrontation of power, capital, social control, or whatever, in the construction of aesthetic forms, [while Drummond], in retreat. hopes rather to spy a random trace of their omnipresence, poking the camera into a city's spaces for a glimpse of puissance. The difference is a capitulation of sorts before the unrelenting advance of "capital" manifest in theories such as Debord's."Koop, Stuart. Art & Text, Jan92, Issue 41, p98-99, 2p, 2 Black and White Photographs. Publisher: Foundation for International Art CriticismGreg Neville in The Age however dismissed Scopic Territories as "a cold and overstated exercise. In that at least it is a good example of the current, Post-Modern Academy style," its catalogue as "impenetrable" and the accompanying video as "interminable," and dismissed a reshowing of the images in Reflex at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, curated by Koop, as "blurry night shots of the city, such as one expects (but does not encourage) in undergraduate students."