Lattice (First Draft Gallery 1987) was a solo painting installation about my grandmother and her house in which I grew up, shown in First Draft Gallery Sydney (an Artist-Run Space initiated by Narelle Jubelin, Paul Saint, Roger Crawford and myself). My grandmother was dying as I created this show and my grief is expressed through looking back beyond greyness into a lost world. The visitor entered the Gallery to be confronted by two back-to-back mirrored self-portraits in a corner, the woman discarding the pink dress of childhood and femininity. Looking from one image to the other mirrored image, the visitor tended to imitate the gesture in the paintings by looking over their shoulders, to be then immersed in the nostalgic ‘film strip’ of triptych paintings filling the rest of the Gallery walls. Each triptych of this ‘film strip’ had as a central image a painted image from an old photo. The side panels were extensions painted from memory with extreme one-point perspectives. The dynamic perspectives encouraged the viewer to travel in and out of these vignettes from childhood, exploring the spaces and memories as they ‘moved through the house’.
Materials: paper, paints.
