Lockdown Art
2020 - 2022
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
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
oil paint on canvas
2021
This Rococo painting by François Boucher 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.
