INTROVERSION. 2025 - FINALIST - Brisbane Portrait Prize 2025

Acrylic on canvas 122 x 92 cm
 This self-portrait is a visual elegy born from the most profound sorrow – the death of my daughter Bronte. Using a subdued palette of ash, flesh & storm, I sought to express the quiet brutality of bearing witness to suffering, while capturing a fractured sense of identity. My masked eyes represent my now more introverted anonymity, and the mask I must now wear to disguise grief while facing the day-to-day, in a world forever changed. The composition takes inspiration from a photograph taken during the bond clean, on the final day of living in our Brisbane bayside rental together, in Thorneside. I left cleaning her shower until the final act. This artwork is not an attempt to find closure; there is none; but a way of speaking the unspeakable, of holding space for her absence, and of honouring the raw, human truth of mourning.