Dean Tirkot
Dean Tirkot is a visual enchanter and photographic portrait artist conjuring luscious, unapologetic and deeply human images from a rich, lived-in world. Known for dreamy, cinematic scenes and radical authenticity, Dean photographs icons, rebels and divine muses in their boldest and most fluid forms. Each frame is an act of care, rebellion and celebration.
Dean’s practice is currently undergoing another transformation.
Working increasingly in country, and now travelling remotely through the interior, he is immersing himself in place and attempting to make something approaching a portrait of country.
For this body of work, Dean will not photograph the current national flag, nor use the nation’s colonial name when referring to the land he moves through. He will refer to it simply as country. This comes from respect for First Nations people and an acknowledgement that the history of this place remains deeply unresolved. Dean doesn’t feel an uncomplicated sense of national pride while dispossession, division and the treatment of First Nations people remain part of the present, not simply the past. He doesn’t pretend to have the answers.
Born here but uncertain of what belonging really means, Dean’s relationship with country is being reconsidered rather than assumed. The work becomes part of that enquiry — an attempt to be present, to listen, and to understand his relationship with the place he calls home without claiming an authority over it that he does not feel he possesses.
Photography remains central, but the practice is expanding. Dean is recording sound and making music and soundscapes in the places he travels through, allowing weather, silence, animals, fire, distance and the incidental sounds of living remotely to enter the work.
Rather than arriving somewhere, making a picture and leaving, he is interested in inhabiting a place long enough to feel it. Being present. Watching. Listening. Making. Letting the environment determine some of what happens.
Increasingly, the process itself has become part of the work. Travelling, setting up and pulling down camp, gathering firewood, washing, cooking, walking, waiting for light, making photographs and recording sound: through repetition, ordinary acts begin to become ritual.
Movement has become part of that ritual too. Reconnecting with skateboarding, Dean moves through country as much as he photographs it — physically, instinctively, almost like a form of improvised dance. The skateboard travels with him, becoming another part of the rhythm of the journey and the work.
There is also an element of construction and play running through the new photographs. Things may be found, moved, assembled, lit, burned, reflected, obscured or deliberately revealed as interventions. The work isn’t pretending to be objective documentation. At times the mechanism is allowed to remain visible — a light, smoke, glass, fire, a human hand — leaving the viewer somewhere between what was encountered and what was made.
The human figure remains part of this evolving practice. Dean continues to photograph people when the encounter feels right, sometimes allowing portraiture to move toward performance, collaboration and ritual. The person may become part of the landscape rather than simply its subject, with body, gesture, fire, water, found materials and country entering into the making of the image.
Dean welcomes collaboration with artists, performers and other creative people whose paths intersect with his. If you are somewhere along the journey and there is a genuine reason to make something together, get in touch.
New landscape works, portraits and photographic constructions from the journey will become available through Dean’s print shop, currently in development.
The journey will also unfold through new episodes on Dean’s YouTube channel, while travel diaries, photographs, behind-the-scenes material and more immediate documentation of the process will be shared through Patreon. Patreon is also a way to directly support the continuation of the work, with a new range of membership tiers currently being developed.
This is still the beginning.
Dean doesn’t yet know exactly what this body of work will become — and, for now, that’s the point.