Sydney-born filmmaker, photographer and writer Joel Ludemann works at the intersection of image and text — a place where landscapes become memory, and poetry becomes a kind of quiet map of experience.
For Poetica, Joel presents three mixed-media works drawn from a long road trip across the American West. Each piece begins with a single landscape photograph — a moment of stillness captured somewhere between desert highway and mountain pass — and surrounds it with fragments of poetry and field notes. The result feels like opening a travel journal mid-sentence: reflective, unguarded, and full of the unfinished edges that define the early, adolescent phase of the creative process.
These works don’t chase closure. Instead, they hold the viewer inside the in-between — the part of making where a thought hasn’t yet hardened into meaning, where intuition moves faster than explanation. It’s this search-for-form quality that aligns Joel’s practice so naturally with Poetica’s exploration of the contemplative and the handmade.
Since completing the trip that inspired these pieces, Joel returned to the West to photograph bears, owls and grey wolves — an immersion in patience, distance and attention that continues to shape his visual language. More of his writing and photography can be found at www.jludemann.com or on Instagram @mustard_lover.
Julia / Julia by Joel Ludemann - available at Lara Hutton Concept Gallery & Store