Are you still watching? 
– after François Boucher
oil paint on canvas
2021 

François Boucher’s Rococo painting Resting Girl (Louise O’Murphy), 1751 has undergone a 2020s update. She lies across her sofa surrounded by hallmarks of our time: online food delivery, wine, ‘self-care’ and the ever-present mobile phone. Items of leisure and luxury, but also the expectations of how she should appear in public. She does not engage with the viewer or with what’s going on outside and even seems disengaged in what she’s looking at. In our viewing of her in this time, are we engaging with her the same way a viewer would’ve a nude female figure in 1752?

This painting was part of the 2021 Wundergym + Wyndham City Council art program and exhibition MAKE SOME NOISE. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns the planned exhibition had to be shifted to a public art outcome, with prints of works pasted up in the Station Place Laneway in Werribee, Victoria. There was also a follow-up exhibition, Salon des Wunder Gym, held for this and other iterations of Wundergym who’s exhibition outcomes were impacted by the pandemic lockdowns. Due to my selling the work and moving to regional Victoria a print was hung in lieu of the actual work. 

The painting referenced, François Boucher’s Resting Girl (Louise O’Murphy), 1751: 

Lockdown Still Lifes
2020 - 2022 

Produced between 2020 and 2022, this series of oil paintings and instant film photographs emerged from the quiet confinement of Melbourne’s extended pandemic lockdowns. With access to live models or travel restricted, I, like Gustave Courbet during his imprisonment in 1871, turned inward—drawing inspiration from the objects immediately around me. Just as Courbet painted still lifes of fish, fruit, and flowers sent to him by his sister, I composed scenes using items at hand: fresh flowers from the garden, wine, lingerie, tarot cards, and jewellery—small luxuries that offered comfort, sensuality, and symbolism during a time of isolation.

The still life genre became a vessel through which I explored themes of femininity, domesticity, and memory. Arranged against dark, minimal backgrounds that reflect the interior solitude of lockdown, these compositions blur the lines between the private and the performative, the everyday and the ornate. Instant film photographs, both embedded in the paintings and presented on their own, underscore a fascination with the fleeting moment and with how we record and recall time spent in seclusion.

The inclusion of tarot cards gestures toward a deeper search for meaning, self-determination, and agency in uncertain times—disrupting passivity and offering alternative narratives beyond confinement. What began as a limitation became a meditation on beauty, longing, and the roles objects play in shaping identity

What is modern romance? Facebook statuses, thirst traps and the presentation of perfection via social media has shifted the boundaries between personal and private almost entriely. The eradication of face-to-face interaction and physical experience in a shared time have all but eliminated the space for intimacy to occur.

Building on the drapery paintings from the Repoussoir series, this new body of work pushes past the interplay of framing and narrative by flattening the picture plane, obstensively removing space; while also presenting a series of allusions to personal romantic experience. The works push back against surface encounters by featuring lush materials that beg for physical touch.

As the context has narrowed through her use of text that speaks to personal moments rather than generalised dramatic themes her choice of material and colour palette have expanded. The range of mediums and approaches reflects on the myriad ways we can experience love, sex and intimacy and emphasises how rich those experiences are by choosing materials and compositions that are baroque and exaggerated even on a very small scale. Even in the smallest moment we can create depths if genuine connection is present.

3 pieces from this ongoing series were part of the ‘Tough Love’ exhibition at Brunswick Street Gallery, Feb 2020. Below are pictures from the exhibition folliowed by some process works for this series.