Photographer Virginia Woods-Jack says her new exhibition opening this week at City Gallery is her most personal yet.
Woods-Jack has joined with fellow photographers Katie Breckon and Mizuho Nishioka in This Must be the Place: Three Photographers, part of the gallery’s winter season of exhibitions. The works address the relationship between photography, place and memory.

For Woods-Jack, her works come from part of a series of photographs taken over the course of a road trip last year with her two young daughters, a trip that came at a time of great change in their lives.

“The trip was in reaction to a very abrupt and unexpected end of my marriage,” she says. “Me and the girls were trying to make sense of what was going on.”

Her photographs are printed on silk and are hung from the ceiling, away from the wall, so that visitors can circumnavigate the photograph, viewing it from either side.

“There’s something very solid about photography and I wanted to give a sense of the fragility I was feeling at the time. Silk is very reactive to the environment – light shines through and it moves with the airflow. It shows nothing is set in stone and everything can change.”

Woods-Jack came to New Zealand eight years ago. Born in the U.K. she received her BA Honours in photography at the University of Creative Arts in Rochester, Kent, and was a Masters in Fine Art from Massey University in 2009. Woods-Jack works in Wellington as a commercial photographer.

This Must be the Place: Three Photographers, City Gallery, June 23 to August 5.