Jasmine Poole + Chris Sewell
Artist's Statement
Working collaboratively, Jasmine and Chris create photographic works that explore the cultural fabric of everyday life. Their practice is grounded in constructing carefully staged scenes using found and collected objects, drawing attention to the quiet narratives embedded within the domestic, suburban, and overlooked.
Their work reflects a shared interest in preservation, not only of objects, but of memory, identity, and lived experience. By recontextualising familiar materials, they create imagined realities that sit somewhere between personal history and collective nostalgia. These scenes become vessels for storytelling, inviting viewers to project their own memories and associations onto the work.
The blending of Jasmine’s sensitivity to stillness, identity, and museum-based preservation with Chris’s background in design, branding, and visual narrative results in images that are both intimate and constructed. Together, they negotiate individual and shared histories, using photography as a means to reflect on belonging, cultural inheritance, and the emotional resonance of the everyday.
Biography
Jasmine and Chris are a Sydney-based artistic duo who began collaborating in 2018, bringing together backgrounds in photography, fine art, art direction, and brand design. Their partnership grew out of an Instagram-based project titled Suburban Kingdoms, which explored shared interests in storytelling, design, and preservation, and soon evolved into the creation of photographic works.
Jasmine was raised in a first-generation Chinese immigrant household in suburban Sydney, an experience that has shaped her ongoing exploration of identity and cultural narrative. With a background in Fine Arts, she is drawn to quiet, contemplative moments, particularly within still life. Photography became her primary creative language, complementing her professional role as a collections photographer at a national museum, where she documents objects to preserve their histories and stories.
Chris grew up in the small mining town of Ollerton, England, where creativity offered a sense of refuge. Trained as a textile print designer in London, he relocated to Sydney 16 years ago and has since worked as Head of Brand and Art Director across numerous Australian fashion labels. His experience has honed a strong sensitivity to visual storytelling, composition, and narrative construction, which carries through into their collaborative practice.
Together, their diverse backgrounds and approaches form a shared visual language that weaves nostalgia, memory, and imagined realities.
Their collaborative works have been selected for numerous prizes, including Still at YAM, National Works on Paper at MPRG, Hazelhurst Art on Paper, Burwood Art Prize, twice in the City of Sydney Australian Life, Fisher’s Ghost Award, and Blacktown Arts Prize.
