Heidi Yardley Antipodean dream

This painting is from a series of works depicting the figure and landscape, exploring our fraught relationship with the natural environment. The painting is based on a hand-made photographic collage created out of found imagery. The cut marks from the paper collage are painted to show a disjunction between the merging of human and nature. The profile of this elegant female head also references portraits of the British royal family that appear on items such as national coins and commemorative plates. This alludes to the monarchy’s governance over Australia – the Antipodes, which in turn speaks of colonisation, questioning notions of identity and ownership in relationship to our natural environment.

- Heidi Yardley, 2014