The heart nourishes the eyes with new blood as the darker blood drains away like old news. It filters back down along well-travelled highways and lesser-known streets making its way back to the pump-house. Here attendants guard their hands, trade cards, wager, and rap the table with a flush of suits. The game follows a rhythm: initiate and respond, initiate and respond. Fresh players arrive from the road, rejuvenated after a brief pit stop. There is a stir, chairs shift, cards flutter; players become excitable, glad, and possessive of their holdings. The newer players leave for the road keen for horizons, peddling bright vision. Past grievances and old hurts have been packed along with their winnings, which they will unwittingly carry with them, blooming from their suitcases and bleeding into a new sky.

Intuitive impulses never quite synchronise with shutter-speeds. The photographic images of Danielle Walpole reveal landscapes that are sensed but often not seen, due to the differing reflexes of hearts and eyes.

Danielle Walpole’s Details depict a central character who experiences a series of beautiful coincidences that have become intertwined with that of a theatrical destiny, as she finds herself vying for authorship over events that are being scripted for her. Walpole’s images are like stills from a short film compiled from outtakes found on the cutting room floor. The camera staggers after her in a drunken tilt, trailing the young woman as she walks through the park on her way home from a cocktail party. It catches her reaching for an exotic flower. It follows her as she walks from the wilderness and into the suburbs, with the streetlights gathering to her like the hallucination of fairies. Her face burns white in angel-fire that has leapt from a car’s headlights. By the shores of a dark river, beyond a cement weir flushed with algal light, dawn strikes an arid bushland paradise that lies separate in time. Walpole's photographic works are raw with chance beauty and meaning. They illuminate the crossroads at which decisions must be made—and rivers must be crossed—in order to bridge the divide between experience and choice.

Samara Mitchell