I have been in love more times than one,
thank the Lord.
... And, oh, have I mentioned
that some of them were men and some were women
and some — now carry my revelation with you —
were trees. Or places. Or music flying above
the names of their makers...
–Excerpt from Of Love, Mary Oliver

We should go about this slowly (2019-25) is a map of the intimacies that have propelled me through various iterations of myself as a mother and a queer woman. The photographs span a period of five years, and approach queerness as a state of radical intimacy; intimacy with lovers, babies, one’s own body, and the domestic space. The individual images operate like sketches or journal entries. They’re close-up, impulsive, undirected. The photographer’s body is both implied and present within the images, operating in physical relativity to its subjects. They move through physical, social and relational spaces; including various houses and beds, the transformations of pregnancy and early motherhood, and evolutions of sexual identity and romantic relationships.

Sophie Bannan (b1989) is an artist, writer and educator based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Working multimodally across image and object making, performance and text, Bannan develops methodologies for appropriation and archive production specific to art historical, genealogical and queer subjectivities. Her work explores subjective histories, primarily using lens-based practices and archival material. Recently, Bannan has been working with found photographs and films from her own archives and those of her father and grandparents. Her photographic collages include media that ranges from iPhone photographs to analogue and historic image making methods, and borrow visual languages from Judson Dance Theatre, 1980s lesbian magazines, poems about plants, recipes with chicken, and photographs of lovers. She generates new subjectivities of domestic joy, queer time and communities of practice.

Bannan completed her MFA at University of Canterbury under the external supervision of Chris Kraus, attended Mountain School of Art (Los Angeles), was a University of Auckland doctoral candidate, and presently teaches secondary school photography and art history. She was a co-founder of artist-run galleries North Projects (Christchurch) and Personal Best (Auckland), wrote a gardening book, and is an occasional contributor to art publications.