Patrick Pound challenges notions of singular authorship by creating works using found photographs and objects from his personal archives, which have been amassed throughyears of obsessive searching and sorting. Pound has amassed 70,000 vernacular photographs and numerous objects. His collections are categorized  according to specific characteristics, each containing their own highly subjective logic. As if the world is a puzzle to be solved, Pound forms complex arrangements and installations of images and objects from his archive,  creating new relationships and ways of seeing things. As he puts it: “To collect is to gather your thoughts through things.”

Pound's work with photography as a collecting device has been included in the five key surveys of Australian Photography: Shadow catchers, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2020, curated by Isobel Parker Philip; Defining Place/Space: Contemporary Photography from Australia, 2019, The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, curated by Deborah Klochko; The Art of the Photograph, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2013, curated by Judy Annear; Episodes, Dong Gang Photography Museum, Korea, 2014, curated by Natalie King and Yong Mi Park; Perfect for Every Occasion: Australian Photography Today, Heide Museum of Art, 2007, curated by Zara Stanhope. Pound's creative practice rethinks collection and display models and unpacks how things might be found to hold and express ideas differently in gallery and museum contexts. He positions the collection as a medium. He also investigates new methods of interconnecting collection works using internet search methods as an organizing system for finding, ordering, and displaying collections as artworks.

In 2017, Pound had a major survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, titled Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition, and was accompanied by a major monograph. Pound has held over fifty solo exhibitions and been included in over eighty curated exhibitions in New Zealand, Australia, France, Germany, England, Korea, Italy, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the UK and USA. In 2018, ‘Patrick Pound: On Reflection’, saw Pound work with the curator Aaron Lister, City Gallery, and Te Papa Tongarewa Museum and National Gallery of New Zealand, in a major installation that performed as a vast palindrome of objects and images. In 2019 Pound was shortlisted with the curator Susan Bright to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. In 2019, Patrick Pound: Photography and Air, saw Pound rethink the collection of the Museo Lazaro Galdiano, in Madrid, alongside his collected objects and photos under the constraint of ‘Air’ for curator Susan Bright’s Déjà vu, Photo Espana.   In 2020 Pound’s collection-based works were installed in a vast matrix hang at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in David Campany’s German photo biennale. In 2022 Pound’s installation of collections featured in David Campany’s A Trillion Sunsets at the ICP, New York. In 2022 Pound also worked with Queensland Art Gallery collections and his own Museum of Air for Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow’s international ‘Air’ exhibition.

Presently, in 2023 Pound’s work closes the vast National Gallery of Victoria book and international exhibition ‘Photography Real and Imagined’, curated by Susan Van Wyk.

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