HANSEN
HOUSE

I found this in an album full of school camps, friends and things I apparently needed to photograph. Including a couch in a Canberra museum. I’m absent from plenty of the photos. I know why: I was more interested in what I was seeing.

Even then, I was drawn to how things came together. Flowers, colour in the backyard, a room. Art, design and technology were my favourite classes, along with any teacher willing to entertain my “peculiar” way of reaching an outcome. Their word, not mine.

And here we have long-life milk and a muesli bar. I’m fairly confident the Year Six girls were doing a content shoot that night. Whatever that meant back then.

Looking through the album, I recognised an instinct I’d spent years second-guessing. The creating never stopped. But the impatience when I paused to look, the comments when the camera came out, made it something I began to hide. Making work for someone else? No problem. Putting my own out there meant meeting that doubt every time.

I wish I’d held on to that freedom a little more fiercely. But we find our way home.

That’s why this photo means something to me. It helped me recognise a way of seeing that existed long before I had the language for it.

It’s also why I talk about lenses and threads. A landscape can become the starting point for a fashion campaign. A conversation can change how I understand a business. Looking through more than one lens lets me notice those connections. Following the thread is how I turn them into something.