For months, I filled sketchbooks with drawings, ideas that circled around what I wanted to say but never quite reached it.
I drew late into the evenings testing different compositions, but each attempt felt too certain and too visible.
It wasn’t until I stopped forcing an image and allowed memory to lead me that something finally moved.
When I started painting Through the Red Dust I worked quickly, almost urgently as if I needed to capture the feeling before it faded.
The surface built up with veils of colour and layers that blurred what was once known, leaving only the essence of what was missing.
The work became less about what was there and more about what had vanished, the land, the rain and the certainty.
I hadn’t entered or shown in the Paddington Art Prize for fifteen years, not since I was pregnant with our eldest. It felt like another lifetime.
There was uncertainty in submitting this piece, wondering if the story it told would resonate.
But when I stepped back from the finished painting, I felt a quiet contentment.
For the first time in a long while, I wasn’t questioning it.
Then came the wait.
Weeks passed and life filled with its usual rhythm of school runs, farm dust, studio days.
And then, one afternoon the email arrived: Congratulations, your work has been selected for the Paddington Art Prize!
ARTIST STATEMENT
“Our family's farm has endured a tough time facing drought. One day in particular was devastating as strong winds swept up the exposed earth into a dust storm that covered most of the states farming communities. The red haze transformed everything into a dreamlike void where the air seemed heavy and suffocating. The notion of absence was particularly confronting, an absence of rain and absence of a once familiar landscape.'