Elaine Campaner photographed transient dioramas of found objects. She played with the spatial relationships between objects, discovering evocative connections, visual illusions and conceptual complexity. Her work often represents certain types of environmental and political imagery that ‘seeps’ into the artist’s domestic life. Potent symbols and forms re-emerge in the miniature world of everyday things: control towers in coffee pots, cooling towers in saltshakers.

Campaner compared her photography to painting, explaining that the object merely replaces the brush. Her eye and imaginative powers focused on the formal qualities and metaphorical possibilities of objects, and the ways in which they might interact ‘to make an image with its own internal visual coherence and narrative.’ 

Elaine Campaner studied at the Sydney College of the Arts and graduated with Honours in 1999. She held several solo shows in Sydney and New Zealand. Selected group shows include Is it a Bird? Is it a Plane?, Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, 2015; Remain in Light: Photography from the MCA Collections, touring exhibition, 2014; Object-shift, Objectspace, Auckland, 2014; Volume One: MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2012-2013; Home Sweet Home: The Peter Fay Collection, National Gallery of Australia, 2003.

Campaner is represented in the collections of Art Bank, Art Gallery of NSW, Deutsche Bank, Macquarie Group Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, National Gallery of Australia, The Art at Parliament Collection, NRMA, Sydney City Council, University of Sydney, UTS Art Collection, University of Wollongong and Hawkesbury One Collective.


To view an archive of Elaine Campaner's works from 1999 to 2020, head to the digital gallery.

For information on available works from the archive, contact Gallery 9.