Virginia Woods-Jack
"Virginia Woods-Jack is a visual artist whose practice is rooted in an ongoing investigation of the interconnected relationships between place, materiality, and memory. Working primarily through photography and time-based media, she explores how personal and collective memory informs our embodied engagement with the natural world, with an enduring emphasis on the politics and poetics of care.
Her work frequently returns to the elemental presences of sky and water-approached not merely as motifs, but as portals to origin, desire, wonder, and ecological experience. These elements function as affective and archival sites, offering ways to contemplate the interwoven narratives of human and more-than-human worlds. Through this lens, Woods-Jack positions photography as a temporal and sensorial medium, one capable of opening up quiet, attentive, and relational modes of being.
Woods-Jack is known for her ongoing material experimentation with the photographic image, consistently pushing the medium's conceptual and formal boundaries. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include sound and text, developing works that evoke layered, immersive experiences. This shift reflects her interest in creating spaces of resonance-sites where perception, memory, and ecology can converge.
Alongside her studio-based work, Woods-Jack is a dedicated advocate for equity in the arts. She is the founder and curator of Women in Photography NZ & AU, a platform supporting the visibility of women and non-binary practitioners across Aotearoa and Australia. Her work has been widely exhibited and is held in collections throughout Aotearoa, Australia, Europe, and North America. She has been featured in publications such as Art Zone NZ, Harper's Magazine, Time, The Guardian, and The Observer, and recognised with awards including finalist selection in the New Zealand Contemporary Art Award and a win in the BJP International Female in Focus Awards.
Through a practice that is both conceptually rigorous and emotionally resonant, Woods-Jack invites a deeper contemplation of how we inhabit and care for the world around us."
