​Sunbeam Sunlight Machine

A cool breeze blows in the lavender light of the early morning, and there's a chill in the still dark water. The uniform outline of surfers rolls with the unbroken swell as they gather offshore and wait. Sitting astride their boards, the young, old, singular, plural, figures join one another to witness the first rays of sun — a morning ritual observed in a constant, timeless succession. Peaceful and personal, on beachside breaks in any number of Australian towns. As the sun slowly rises, and the sand and rocks turn golden and warm, the beach transforms for sunbathers, swimmers, walkers, romantics — they are languid and idyllic, and like the surfers, in search of elemental connections to the sun and sea. It's the east coast for sunrise, and the west for sunset.

In 1937 Max Dupain’s Sunbather visually defined our relationship with the beach — in black and white, the iconic tanned arms and air of relaxed solitude are palpably relatable. In Dupain’s minimal composition, we can feel the sun on our back, see warm red sneaking in through closed eyes, taste drying salt on our lips, and hear the waves behind us. Sunbather continues to manifest reality for generations of Australians and our enduring connection to the saltwater and sand. More than any other example of our enduring iconography — this is Australia’s collective image — ringed by an ocean, its how we define our leisure.

Sunbeam Sunlight Machine, a playful description of the mechanical truth of photography, embodies this revered connection to coast. Through a collection of 35 mm photography and oil painting, artists Samuel Keirnan and Annabelle Reidy explore the physical, ephemeral, and spiritual fixation we continue to have with the Australian coastline.

Reidy and Keirnan met as part of a critique session at Side Gallery, where Sunbeam would eventually hang, and bonded over a shared love of Endless Summer, surf culture, and personal connection to the water. As their concept for Sunbeam developed around these shared experiences, Reidy and Keirnan would travel together to the coast for a handful of reconnaissance trips — each with a camera in hand. These images, along with archival imagery from Reidy’s existing catalogue, would serve as the blueprint for a collaboration that is part documentary and part dreamy, coastal nostalgia.

Growing up between Brisbane and Aberdeen, Scotland, Reidy has always been connected to the sea. While enlisted in the Navy, she began to photograph daily life at sea, eventually earning her the unofficial role of the ship’s photographer. Documenting the crew in their day to day routine led Reidy to develop an observational eye, and her practice continues to be informed by the ever present ocean and the objective framing of a photojournalist. After leaving the Navy in 2022, she began to shoot landscapes in black and white almost exclusively, and continues to engage with the ocean as her primary subject.

Reidy’s beach is dramatic. In black and white her photographs illustrate what Dupain’s does not — the rugged and calloused realism of our mythologised coastline. Documenting the raw beauty of the ocean under a variety of conditions, Reidy offers us a chance to appreciate the elemental nature of coastal surf destinations. Heavy, cyclonic skies and misty rain over iconic tourist beaches contradict the idyllic calm of a board in the shade — Reidy, in her groove as the impartial observer, typifies the mechanical truth of film- light and aperture and the recorded moment.

For Keirnan, photography serves as a starting point for an interrogation of the national sentimentality we hold for our beaches. In contrast to Reidy’s steely objectivity, Keirnan’s photography leans into the format’s less celebrated capacity to be influenced and fallible, as akin to memory as a mechanical process can be. Painting at a small scale onto wooden panel, Keirnan’s lofi oils are reproductions of photographs taken on location, and mimic the soft grain and colour drift that make film a favourite visual proxy for memory. The late afternoon silhouette of a weatherboard and Norfolk Island pine, sun rays over nameless headlands, and the blue on blue expanse of an unbroken horizon call to mind our best days spent in coastal anywhere. Keirnan accents his landscapes with personal fragments, a glimpse of a towel and an anonymous shadow, a meeting of sunshades framing a sliver of clear sky, and the fiction of the beach is complete and tangible.

Together Keirnan and Reidy’s practices provide interesting counterpoints in the treatment of their subject — which appears in stark realism and as an enduring conceptual daydream. This is an interesting juxtaposition, as together they expose the complexities of our national love for the beach — often windy, rough, dangerous, and rugged but always where we’d rather be — in the sunshine of our mind.

By Jessica McNicol