Between Worlds by Polixeni Papapetrou was made in Victoria, Australia, between 2009 and 2012, staging masked child figures in coastal, desert, mountain, and bush landscapes to examine childhood as a state suspended between fantasy and adult life.
Across the series, Papapetrou explores liminality, otherness, and the unstable boundaries between human and animal, child and adult, nature and culture. Produced as her own children were moving toward adolescence, the work also reflects a more personal threshold: the artist’s shifting experience of motherhood and, after a cancer diagnosis in 2007, a move away from literary source material toward images generated more intuitively. These themes are grounded in broader cultural conditions. Between Worlds responds to growing public anxiety around the visibility of children, especially in the wake of debates about privacy, censorship, and the circulation of photographic images. At the same time, the project engages the Australian landscape as a charged historical space, shaped by settler narratives of estrangement, danger, and the recurring motif of the lost child in the bush.
That sense of being between states is carried by the project’s visual language. Papapetrou presents children wearing animal masks—horse, rabbit, pig, penguin, gorilla—posed in carefully staged tableaux that suggest ritual, play, or allegory. The figures often appear motionless and frontal, held within landscapes that operate less as scenery than as habitats. Color is central: party dresses, costumes, and masks stand against ochres, greens, blues, and the pale light of snow or dust. The images combine theatrical artifice with natural settings, producing scenes that feel at once plausible and estranging.
Papapetrou worked with a square-format camera and shallow depth of field, keeping the figures crisp while allowing the surrounding terrain to soften. She relied largely on natural light, sometimes using large reflectors and occasional fill flash to manage the uneven brightness of the Australian bush. The final works were produced as large-scale pigment inkjet prints, and their surreal quality comes from physical staging, props, and performance rather than digital manipulation.
Initially received as a mature development in Papapetrou’s practice, Between Worlds was exhibited widely in Australia and internationally, including at Photoquai in Paris and Noorderlicht in the Netherlands. It has since remained central to accounts of her work, both for its response to the politics of childhood and for the way it joins performative photography to the Australian landscape.
