Abigail Varney: Rough & Cut
Rough & Cut is Abigail Varney’s latest photographic project dedicated to Coober Pedy, a remote town in central Australia founded in 1915 following the discovery of opal seams — the iridescent gemstone formed from water that once covered the desert landscape.
Through a series of journeys into the heart of this extreme territory, Varney documents a place suspended between survival and dream, marked by cyclical periods of prosperity and decline that have brought opal mining close to exhaustion.
Beyond the stretches of mullock heaps — the mounds of mining debris that punctuate the desert — and away from the relentless sun, lies an underground world of dugouts: homes carved into the rock where the remaining miners live, still driven by the hope of one last, decisive strike.
With an attentive and empathetic gaze, Varney conveys the eccentric and irreducible identity of Coober Pedy through the faces and stories of those who have chosen to call this place their “forever home.” The images capture the traces of a magnetic, surreal landscape shaped by extreme conditions and an equally radical resilience.
About the Author
Abigail Varney is a Melbourne-based portrait and documentary photographer whose practice is driven by a deep curiosity about Australia’s land, communities, and ecology. Her work seeks out overlooked and untold stories, illuminating the richness and complexity of contemporary Australian life.
After graduating from Photography Studies College in Melbourne in 2013, Varney completed an internship with Mary Ellen Mark in New York City. In 2014, her portrait series was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Her long-term documentary project Rough & Cut (2014–2018), produced in Coober Pedy, has been shown in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra, as well as internationally in the United Kingdom and Russia.
Her ongoing project The Build Up was featured in the 2019 Spring Exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne and was a finalist in the Stories category of the Australian Photography Awards. In 2020, Varney joined the photography collective Oculi and is set to publish her first book with Trespasser, an independent art book publisher based in Texas.
