Artist Interview: Conversation with JD Reforma

JD Reforma lives and works on Dharug Country in Western Sydney as an artist, writer and curator, whose practice recontextualises elements of contemporary visual culture including pop music, celebrity, fashion and advertising. His work examines how these forces shape personal and political experience and often reveals inequities of race and class within cultural systems.

A pool is a promise is a series of family photographs that have been selected, obscured and reshaped before being printed onto aluminium and mounted behind large frames of mirror polished steel. The works explore the relationship between surface and memory and create nostalgic environments where image and reflection merge.

This interview between JD Reforma and Adele Packer, MAMA Assistant Curator, occurred in July 2026.

This work was commissioned by the Penrith Regional Gallery for its exhibition The Pool Show, which considered the public swimming pool as both a space of leisure and a socially and politically charged site. How does A pool is a promise fit within this broader theme, and how do you hope audiences will experience it?

I cycled through a few ideas before I landed on these photographs, which was surprising because I've had at least one of them stuck to my fridge for the last ten years. Sometimes ideas are just sitting in your kitchen and all it takes to find them is reaching for a bottle of milk. The title actually came from an earlier proposal of this work, and it just stuck. I always think of titles first, I think they're just these provocations that start shaping my daily perception and help me hone in on an idea. In the context of an exhibition about pools... I just thought I would regret not making a work about a pool resort that my family owned and operated of which I had hundreds of fabulous photographs. As an artist I think you have a responsibility to be resourceful and attentive to waste; I also just loved the idea of letting my family see themselves in my work for once.

Your work often recontextualises contemporary media and popular culture, but this piece draws on images from your family archive and personal memories. What led you to abstract these images, and how did that allow you to explore memory, identity, and family history?

The photos capture Villa Lorenzo, a beautiful local resort my family established in the Philippines in the 1990s after discovering a natural spring. Even as a seven-year-old, I thought this was incredibly mad and special. If you can imagine it being founded in the middle of an agricultural community, it was built by farmers so it had a very handcrafted feel – nipa-thatched bungalows, limestone-washed slides, coconut-palm reliefs on the walls. They even disguised a door into one of the walls and if you opened it you were just staring out onto acres of rice paddies, it was honestly astonishing. My Tito Marcos designed it and he was very aesthetically discerning – in fact we share the same birthday and we're both gay, so my mum would always fondly speculate that we were spiritually connected. As to what led me to these images... well, the global financial crisis devastated a lot of small communities invested in poorly managed institutions so we had to sell the resort, and that was just eviscerating – something that employed my entire extended family and so many others in that community suddenly evaporated, and I don't think anyone recovered spiritually from that loss, let alone financially. Our time at the resort as a family were my fondest memories of childhood, and I'm at a point in my practice and in my life where I just want to make things for myself and my family; there's something very rewarding about having a more intimate, arm's length practice. There's so many images that deserve retelling and reframing, I don't always need to make new ones.

Materials in your practice often carry meaning beyond their physical form. What drew you to the mirror in this work, and how does its materiality shape the work's narrative and meaning?

I had been drawn to these particular kinds of steel mirrors for a while, because they're relics of design that are being utilised less and less. You only really encounter them in public pools or bathrooms that were constructed between the 1950s –1980s. Now they're absolutely battered – dented, scratched, graffitied, plastered with piss and stickers, and basically indestructible. They're like paintings that have been emerging slowly over decades. I've used new ones because I wanted to play more with reflection in this work; the steel doesn't perfectly reflect you like a glass mirror does, so, while you're looking at me and my cousins building human pyramids, you might also see yourself distorted – which is what nostalgia does. It distorts the past and maybe makes it more palatable; it makes growing older more tolerable because memory always softens the edges of truth.

JD Reforma is a finalist of the 2026 National Photography Prize, presented by the MAMA Art Foundation.

On until 22 November 2026

Photography by Jeremy Weihrauch