“I have a very strong urge that I need to be creating something all the time,” says Hobart photographer, Kelly Gerdes. “I simply don’t feel satisfied or complete if I am not working on something new.” Gerdes bought her first DSLR while living in Albany, WA. Her first real passion was landscape photography. “I loved nothing more then being able to jump in the car on a warm evening and just drive to somewhere random and spend a few hours in the quiet, taking in my surroundings,” she says.
When Gerdes moved to Hobart a little over three years ago, she used the opportunity to assess her interests and realised that her need to be creative was more than just a hobby. Being at home a lot more with children, Gerdes started to explore a new world of imagery with her macro lens. “I found a real love and connection with abstract and illustrative images,” she says.
Gerdes was named the 2013 EPSON Tasmanian Emerging Photography of the Year. In 2014, Gerdes started working on a series of images, Smoke & Mirrors, which are made by photographing hundreds of images of smoke and compositing them to create scenes. With these images, she was named 2014 AIPP Tasmanian Illustrative Photographer of the Year, was a finalist for the 2014 APPA Illustrative Photographer of the Year, and awarded 2014 APPA Highest Scoring Print with a history making score of 100/100. She was also a semi-finalist in the 2014 Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize and a finalist in the 2015 World Photographic Cup, representing Australia in the Illustrative category.
Gerdes is in the early stages of planning a first solo exhibition with the Smoke & Mirrors series. “I will admit this part of the journey has not been an easy process,” she says, referring to the challenge of pitching her work in the marketplace. “But when I love doing something this much, I find it impossible to give up and will keep chipping away at it.”
Earlier this year, she was awarded seven Golds out of her eight entries in the 2015 EPSON Tasmanian Professional Photography Awards, and was a finalist for AIPP Tasmanian Illustrative Photographer of the Year. She is the current president of the Tasmanian chapter of the AIPP.
kellygerdesphotography.com.au
