Silver Lining Awards: Ruth Woodrow’s winning montage
How’s this for a creative lockdown project? It’s a montage of “shoe selfies” from one person’s daily walks around Melbourne.
How’s this for a creative lockdown project? Ruth Woodrow, who’s had to work from home since March, has been taking daily strolls around the south Melbourne neighbourhood where she has lived for 25 years, and discovering things she’d never noticed before: interesting motifs, colours and patterns in the ground at her feet. She has recorded each little find with a “shoe selfie” – a shot of her size 8 runners planted on the spot – and put the images together in this montage. She calls the project Melbourne in Isolation. It’s about documenting her experience of the pandemic, she says, and taking the time to exercise both her body and her creative imagination. It’s about finding silver linings.
When she’s not looking at her world through a viewfinder, Woodrow, 50, is usually looking at it through binoculars. She’s a fanatical birder, and shares this passion with her husband of 21 years, Paul. They’re pretty competitive about it: they still hold the Victorian record for the most bird species spotted in a year, she says proudly – it was back in 2010, when they spent every weekend on field trips, chalking up 392 species. The love of birding led her to Serendip Sanctuary near Geelong, where she now works as a ranger for Parks Victoria, and it inspires all the couple’s overseas holidays, too. They’ve been to Cuba (where they spotted the world’s smallest bird, the bee hummingbird, a jewel-like thing that weighs only a couple of grams), Costa Rica, Borneo, South Africa and the Galapagos Islands, among other places. “I don’t know when we’ll ever get the chance to go abroad again!” she says with a rueful laugh.
A couple of years ago, having ticked off just about every bird species in Victoria, they started to get seriously into photography – and transferred their competitive impulses into that, too. The regular competitions run by Melbourne Camera Club are a rich source of rivalry in the relationship (“Paul’s beating me in one of the categories, and I’m leading in the other”), but also a way to bounce creative ideas around. “We do help each other, of course,” she insists.
It was Paul who suggested she do something with all the shoe selfies, so she arranged them in this pleasing montage and entered it into the Newcomer category of a one-off Covid-era photo competition, appropriately called the Silver Lining Awards. Paul entered one of his images, too. And here’s something Ruth can dine out on for months, once the city’s lockdown ends: he was a runner-up, and she won.
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