Rozalind Drummond

Penny Webb writing on Durmmond's 2007 collaborative show with Stuart Bailey, Carpetweed, at Victoria Park Gallery, Abbotsford, discerns a more effective "exchange ... established between these two bodies of work - six photographs pinned around the space; six constructions on the floor: a meeting of minds, you might say. Rozalind Drummond has cast a dispassionate eye on piles of materials and objects, discarded or yet to be claimed, in the process of some sort of office move or domestic upheaval."

In 1997 she was awarded a Samstag Scholarship of A$30,000, plus airfares and fees, for a year of overseas study during which she took an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London. Co-recipients were Zhong Chen, Lyndal Jefferies, Steven Holland, and Julie Gough. Later in Australia she completed a Master of Arts (Art in Public Space), RMIT University, Melbourne in 2017. Since then she has exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is in major public collections.

Drummond has applied a feminist visual critique to gender. Reacting to her 1996 exhibition Bunny Rug reprising American pinup photographer Bunny Yeager's self-portraits reviewer Bruce James of the Sydney Morning Herald finds himself "unpersuaded but provoked." In a 1997 issue of ArtAsiaPacific, Natalie King described the installation Peeping Tom (1995) by Drummond as, “A group of large format, toned photographs … haphazardly pinned to the gallery walls like an archive,” suggesting not an institution but the “archive” as a collection of related things (whether in subject or form), inviting, as Freda Freiberg remarked, "a surreptitious peep, if not a studied gaze, at the bodies and business of others..." and to "turn our gaze back on the professional peepers, to play their game. We are asked to play the sleuth." However, reviewing more conventional imagery in Perfect for Every Occasion at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2007, critic Robert Nelson dismissed as "feeble happy snaps," her portraits of youths; "Even the scene where one girl touches another, which is given the dramatic title Now Everyone Knows, seems unmomentous."

Drummond's Peeping Tom (named from Michael Powell’s film) was shown at Monash University Gallery, November 1995 to February 1996. Beside found photographs it included three video screens; one showing Powell's 1960 movie; another voyeuristically tracking a woman as she weaves through museum displays; and a third with a live feed of the exhibition space in which the viewer can see themselves recorded. The sum of these parts places the audience in the role of victim and aggressor simultaneously. It is a frequently referenced work, early on by artist and writer Perry Fowler;

Less than ten years into her career, in 1993, Drummond and painter Geoff Lowe were invited by curator Juliana Engberg to produce an exhibition involving collaboration with Vietnamese artists supported by Asialink's Australian art to Asia project and hosted by the Hanoi School of Art, the nation's first contemporary art contact with Vietnam. Choosing to show typical examples of their Australian contemporary art practice, Drummond took long contact proofs, titled Voyeur and excepted from monochrome Super 8 footage which had been made between 1960–65, which could be unrolled and pinned to the gallery wall either horizontally or vertically, allowing viewers' own interpretation of narrative, and reported that some of the Vietnamese artists were surprised she chose not to frame her photographs.

The exhibition was shown in Australia as Vietnam at the Waverley City Gallery from 25 February to 28 March 1993, in which Zara Stanhope points to "Drummond's creative acts of framing and filming," and "unsettling juxtaposition of unfamiliar, geographically distant images" which "disrupt the convention of the invisible journalistic photographer [and] Western modes of narrative and brings about reconsideration of viewing responsibilities." Drummond also included a series of untitled black-and-white photos extracted from an unfinished video she made in Vietnam in which scenes in motion were rendered blurred and out of focus. A single framed passport photo facing a group of like images at opposite ends of a long narrow space that for Stanhope signify "the individual made poweriess before structures of the mass or of nation. The passport proves the existence of the refugee and reminds us that those who cross frontiers are, like criminals, the objects ol surveillance."

Rebecca Lancashire more positive in reviewing Location, at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 1992, notes "Rozalind Drummond's black and white Melbourne scenes, deliberately out of focus: images of flux and uncertainty," and Zara Stanhope addressing Reflex as an exhibition of ironically "bad" photography, in which Drummond's work accompanied that of Susan Fereday, Graeme Hare, Les Walking and David Stephenson, described hers as "dynamic images;"

Drummond's embrace of postmodernist traits prompted mixed reviews. Beatrice Faust slighted her contributions to the National Gallery of Victoria's 1988 Excursions into the Postmodern: Five Melbourne Photographers; New Acquisitions, writing that she had failed to make "a coherent body of work," and that beside John Gollings' studies "powerful melding of architectural, pornographic and optical images," hers were "sketchy and trivial." Canberra Times critic Helen Musa by contrast understood in 1992 that Drummond "uses photography to exploit the distance between the real and the fictional." Stuart Koop ambiguously qualified such a response in comparing separate 1991 exhibitions by Drummond (Scopic Territories at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art) and Wolfgang Sievers' industrial photographs (at National Gallery of Victoria) to identify her...

From 1986-88 Drummond was Assistant Director at George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne, and she has held academic positions as Lecturer in Photography, Victorian College of the Arts, School of Art, Melbourne 1987-89, Lecturer in Photography, School of Art and Design, Monash University, Caulfield Campus 1990-91 and Lecturer in Photography, School of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Burwood Campus until 2014.

Reviewers recognised an allusive and elliptical gaze in Drummond's oeuvre from early on in her career, with Max Dupain in 1986 describing as "intensely introverted" her imagery in The Melbourne Stage: Photographs by four post-graduates at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney;

Drummond first showed solo in 1985 at George Paton Gallery (where she was to become assistant director the following year).

Drummond trained initially at Prahran College 1982-84, an institution which Australian Centre for Photography director Deborah Ely recognised in 1999 as producing "some of the country's most acclaimed practitioners" including Drummond amongst them, beside "Bill Henson, Carol Jerrems, Steve Lojewski, Janina Green and Christopher Koller". From 1985–86 she undertook a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art at the School of Art in the Victorian College of the Arts where Bill Henson, as noted by Max Dupain, was her supervisor.

Rozalind Drummond (born 1956) is a photographic artist and an early exponent of postmodernism in Australia.