IT’S literally been a creative flight of fancy for South Fremantle’s Sarah Jenkins and her daughter Lucy.

The pair have wowed the art scene with their minimalist drone shots, winning international prizes and publishing deals across the globe.

For Sarah it’s been a liberation of sorts – she is confined to a wheelchair with muscular dystrophy and can’t operate a conventional camera.

• Lucy and Sarah Jenkins.

The drone gives her a set of metaphorical wings to explore the sky and capture striking images.

“The joy of creating art has been a real positive in my life,” Sarah says.

“It has given me an identity that is not related to my disability.” 

The duo, known as Air Bare, love taking photographs of basketball, netball and tennis courts, where the stark white lines pop against the solid blue. It creates a geometric abstraction you would normally find in works by artists like Wassily Kandinsky.

• Sarah flying her drone.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Lucy is an architectural graduate.

“Our favourite artists that have influenced our work are Australia’s Brad Walls and the Swede Marcus Cederberg,” Sarah says.

“Both use a combination of drone photography and minimalism which is not very common among minimalist photographers as a whole.

“Our images were featured in the coffee table book Minimalism in Photography by the German publishing company te Neues in 2022, which was an absolute thrill and honour.”

Their debut exhibition A Take on Minimalism features 38 drone shots of Fremantle, country WA and Far North Queensland, taken over the past four years.

Sarah says they learned to fly a drone in 2020 during lockdown.

“At the time we were living together in moderate covid restrictions in Port Douglas,” she says.

“Lucy flew the drone and took most of the images in the early days, with both of us involved in the editing process. I then took over the drone photography when she returned to Melbourne.

“Our image of a girl, sitting on a pool float ring reading a magazine in the middle of a basketball court won the Single Shot category of Capture Magazine’s Australasia’s Top Emerging Photographers Award in 2021.”

• One of their arty drone shots Don’t go breaking my heart.

It’s been a nomadic life for the Jenkins family – Sarah trained as a nurse at Fremantle Hospital in the early 80s and was in charge of the Red Cross Blood Transfusion Centre for a spell.

She lived in North Freo for 11 years, when Lucy was born, before moving to Sydney in 2015 and Port Douglas in 2020.

Just over a year ago, she decided to come back to WA and live in South Fremantle.

Meanwhile, Lucy recently moved to the other side of the world to work at the renowned architects Foster + Partners in London.

She’s still involved in “ideas” and the processing of images, and just bought a new drone, so we might get some minimalist shots of Wimbledon.

“The world is our canvas, and we can’t wait to share our creations with the people of Perth,” Sarah says.

A Take on Minimalism is at the Moores Building Art Space in Fremantle from February 17-March 3. It’s free and open daily from 10am-3pm. A raffle on closing night will raise funds for Neuromuscular WA, which supports people living with muscular dystrophy and neuromuscular conditions.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK