Image: Carmen Alcedo, Poner el mundo boca abajo (detail), 2025, courtesy of the artist
January 27 - March 20, 2026
Opening event: Friday, February 6, 5:30-7:30pm
Gallery I, 154 Angas St, Kaurna Yarta
Free entry, all welcome
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You can find Carmen’s exhibition in The Mill’s Gallery I, located at 154 Angas St, Kaurna Yarta (Adelaide).
Gallery I is open Monday-Friday, 10am-4pm.
Accessibility
The Mill’s entrance has a small step into the building. We have a ramp available, please ring the doorbell and our friendly team will assist you.
During gallery hours, our entrance will be unlocked. If the door is closed, please ring the doorbell to alert our team.
The Mill has concrete flooring throughout with no internal steps and a disability toilet on site.
Read more in-depth information on our accessibility web page.The Mill has concrete flooring throughout with no internal steps and a disability toilet on site.
Read more in-depth information on our accessibility web page.
We are excited to present Hasta La Raíz, a new exhibition by Carmen Alcedo developed through our Photographer in Residence program, presented with support from the Ana and Christopher Koch Foundation and Black and White Photographic.
Through layered digital and analogue collage, Carmen creates atmospheric images referencing her personal experience of migration from Spain to Australia. Archival images and elements from her hometown of Sevilla are layered with portraits of her grandparents, nieces and her younger self, and contrasted with photographs taken over her four years of living here in Australia. The opera house, iron rich red dirt and twisting branches of gum trees sit alongside images of her children in makeshift La Semana Santa costume; Carmen’s beloved nieces play under the watchful eye of a golden winged angel; petals open portals to connection and play.
Deeply complex, and brimming with symbolism and personal narrative Carmen’s new body of work invites us into an emotional reflection. What are the emotions that we feel when we think of home? What happens when the idea of home that we long for is no longer a physical place that we can visit? How does identity ebb and flow through our every day life? What anchors us in culture, identity and memory?
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Carmen Alcedo is a Spanish-born freelance photographer based in Adelaide, South Australia, with a background as a lawyer. With over seven years of experience in professional photography, her work focuses on storytelling, capturing personal narratives and intimate moments through both portrait and documentary photography. Carmen’s artistic practice explores themes of identity, transformation, and human connection, often delving into how we relate to our environment and the people around us. She combines technical proficiency with emotional depth to create visual narratives that resonate with the viewer. Carmen’s exhibitions include Imaginary Journeys (SALA 2024), currently on display at Cherrybomb Cafe in Adelaide, and my participation in the group exhibition TEACHERS, LEAVE THE KIDS ALONE at 229LAB in Paris (2024), the Hybrid Art Fair (2016-2018) and the Affordable Art Fair in Sydney (2022). Currently, Carmen is involved in community-driven art projects in the Brompton Community Garden, where she collaborates with others to create work that fosters connection and environmental awareness.
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Memory never returns as it was lived; it arrives transformed, layered with distance, imagination, and longing. What we love becomes shaped by absence, turning into a kind of fiction, a version charged with nostalgia and emotion. The fragile space between truth and imagination is where my practice unfolds.
This exhibition is about my personal experience of migration and the constant negotiation of identity it involves. The cultural clash of displacement leaves me feeling suspended, forcing me to question every day who I am, where I come from, and how to situate myself in a place that does not belong to me. From the most ordinary details to the most unexpected, everything fractures, creating an abyss where familiar anchors - culture, identity, memory - recede, demanding the reconstruction of a world from zero, yet built with all that you already are and all that you belong to.
Each photograph I create carries a deeply personal story through overlapping layers and collage. These layers include images I have taken since arriving in Australia four years ago in a really intuitive way, from the landscapes that surround me here to fragments of my grandmothers’ homes in Spain. Within them, I place the ache of moments never lived, the strangeness of cultural fragments, and the difficulty of transmitting my heritage to my children in a way that feels alive rather than imposed.
The process of making this body of work has been an exercise in giving voice to what I am, to what converges within me, and to honour the places, the people, and the culture I come from. Here, photography becomes not only a medium of documentation but also of transformation. By layering images, I attempt to bridge distances - between countries, generations, and languages - while also honouring what remains unbridgeable. My practice is a way of inhabiting those gaps with honesty, tenderness, and resilience.
This exhibition has support from
