HER SMALL WHITE HANDS
2021
Copic marker and UV ink on Canson Rag.
7.5 x 3 metres.
Documentation video by Levi Ingram.
Stills by Hails and Shine.
Geelong Gallery online talks event: ‘Talking Art—Lisa Sullivan, Jill Orr & Sarah Walker.’
Commissioned by Geelong Gallery.
In 1890, Frederick McCubbin painted the iconic work, A Bush Burial, featuring a family gathered around an anonymous grave. His wife, Annie, served as the model for the grieving woman clutching a small girl.
Four years later, the couple’s first child, Mary, died when she fell from her pusher onto a cobblestone street. She was three.
Her small white hands takes the form of a script; a conversation between painter and model. Gaps start to form in the dialogue, which, when raked with a UV torch, reveal Annie’s inner monologue. As she stands, posing for a grief she has not yet felt, she experiences a vision of the loss of her child. Future and present collide. The unutterable comes to her, her thoughts bloat and race, until the ink itself begins to run down the wall.
Exploring death, apprehension and women’s interiority, Her small white hands engages with the idea of the artwork as memento mori, and reintegrates the life of one of Australia’s most revered Impressionist painters.
I speak about the work here, in conversation with artist Jill Orr and curator Lisa Sullivan.