Up and coming solo exhibition ~
Drew Hopper
West of Somewhere East
28 May – 28 June
Yarrila Arts and Museum.
West Of Somewhere East is a photographic series tracing a cinematic journey through the interior of New South Wales, shaped by long drives, fleeting encounters, and the reflective rhythm of return.
Grounded in Drew Hopper’s upbringing travelling across Australia, West Of Somewhere East reflects a way of seeing that is formed through movement, both observational and deeply personal. Situated within post-documentary practice, the series resists straightforward description. Rather than documenting the Australian interior, the photographs act as meditations on perception, memory, and atmosphere, where seeing is inseparable from feeling. Composed through quiet attention to light, texture, and form, the images gather fragments of the in-between: roadside geometries, weathered surfaces, and shifting spatial tensions. Together, they reveal a subdued Australia, shaped by suggestion rather than spectacle. Within the Great Southern Land, the landscape emerges as both vast and intimate – marked by distance, resilience, and quiet transformation. Human presence lingers only in traces, set against the enduring scale of the land. Balancing observation and interpretation, the series blurs the line between document and image. It becomes a space where place and memory converge.
Image: Drew Hopper, Hills Hoist, 2020, cotton rag print.
Yarrila Arts and Museum is situated on the land of the Gumbaynggirr people. Open Tuesday to Friday 10am - 4pm. Saturday and Sunday 10am - 2pm
Closed on Mondays and all NSW Public Holidays.
@drewhopper@yam.coffs@cityofcoffsharbour
EXHIBITION LAUNCH | Drew Hopper: West of Somewhere East
Yarrila Arts and Museum
Thursday 28 May, 5:30 – 7:00pm
Free entry. All welcome
Light refreshments provided
YAM Bar open
Join us for the opening of ‘West of somewhere east’, a photographic series tracing a cinematic journey through the interior of New South Wales, shaped by long drives, fleeting encounters, and the reflective rhythm of return. Composed through quiet attention to light, texture, and form, the images gather fragments of the in-between: roadside geometries, weathered surfaces, and shifting spatial tensions. Together, they reveal a subdued Australia, shaped by suggestion rather than spectacle.
Drew Hopper is a Coffs Coast based photographer whose narrative approach to photography is shaped by a deep curiosity for the world and a commitment to visual storytelling that reveals the extraordinary in the everyday. He has spent more than a decade working in Australia and internationally, and he has contributed extensively to Australian Geographic, producing feature stories that explore human connection to land, culture, and community.
For more information and to RSVP visit the link in bio.
Image: Drew Hopper, Hills Hoist, 2020, cotton rag print
#westofsomewhereeast #photographyexhibition #gumbaynggirrcountry @yam.coffs #yam #yarrilaartsandmuseum
Inspired by the great Nils Frahm's spellbinding EP titled 'Night', which has to be one of my all time favourite compositions!
#nilsfrahm #night #abstract #contemporaryart #classicalmusic
Fremantle felt like stepping into a place that remembers things. The only corner of Perth that carried a kind of character you can’t manufacture, worn in rather than designed, shaped by time instead of trend. Streets that don’t rush you. Buildings that hold onto their past in chipped paint, sun-faded signage, and the quiet weight of stories layered over decades.
Walking through it felt like wandering down memory lane, even without the memories. There’s something in the air. Its in the salt, warmth and softness that makes everything feel familiar. Verandahs casting long shadows, shopfronts that haven’t forgotten who they were, light spilling gently across textured walls. It’s a place that invites you to slow down, to notice. A place where nostalgia isn’t stage, it just exists.
A truly photogenic urban pocket, not because it tries to be, but because it simply is.
#fremantle #westernaustralia #fujifilm_au
#fujifilmx100vi #monochrome
Between the hum of a tired fluorescent light and the soft rush of water against tile, her quiet body gathers life in the half-dark while beyond the wall, the outback burns amber and red, a lone tree bent by dry wind, a Land Rover idling beneath a sky too wide to hold, and in the gloaming, two blurred figures linger, shotgun trembling, spinifex and silence pressing in around them. Two wilds existing at once, one vast and sun-scorched, the other small, secret, and just beginning.
Glen Innes, Australia 2020
When I think of Australia, two pictures linger in my mind that I made some years ago. The first, the Victoria Bitter sign standing proud in the twilight afterglow,
and a lone sunbather on the grass, soaking up the summer sunshine.
To me, it’s the spirit of place, the ordinary and unhurried. Both scenes bathed in glorious light, where even the simplest moments feel like home and that quiet ease is what makes it unmistakably Australian.
From the series ‘Between The Light’, which is a meditation on mortality, silence, and the spaces that exist between. What began as a fear of death became a quiet conversation with it, through moss-covered headstones, fading names, and the soft light that slips between worlds. These images aren’t about endings, but thresholds: the trembling edge where loss turns to reverence, and grief becomes a kind of wonder.
A grave, surrendered to nature’s slow embrace, where death is but a quiet memory, wrapped in the endless tendrils of time, as life blooms and fades in silent reverence. Death feels distant here, just a quiet memory folded into time as life blooms and withers around it.
I wonder about the family. Do they still come, or has this place been abandoned to the earth? Is the creeping beauty of vines a quiet reverence, or simply neglect? Who was buried here, and how did they live?
There’s a haunting peace in the way the grave surrenders, not forgotten, but transformed—woven into the land as if even memory belongs to nature in the end.
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#fujifilmx_au #GFX100RF #greenblooded #newtopographics #myfeatureshoot #nowherediary #we_lookmag #gumbaynggirr #framesmag #paperjournalmag #visualpoetryphotography #naturephotography #graveyardphotography #cemetary #regionalaustralia #burnmagazine #thinkverylittle #subjectivelyobjective #australianphotographer #drewhopper @fujifilmx_au
