Artist sitting in chair blindfolded, surrounded by other figures who are also blindfolded.

Northern Beaches Secondary College Manly Campus

The Artist's Grief

Time-Based Forms

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K

The Artist’s Grief is an exploration of mourning, deeply personal and thematically universal. Inspired by the highly stylised works of Bill Viola, my body of work’s use of recognisable paintings is intended to catalogue depictions of grief throughout art history. I have interwoven a series of shots taken inside a church to keep the film grounded in reality, influenced by Barry Jenkins’ careful control of mise en scène for emotional authenticity in Moonlight. Within a world in which the real and surreal, the mundane and otherworldly coexist, my work represents the disorienting experience of observing death at close range.

My artmaking practice has been influenced by the study and interpretation of the following artists: Bill Viola, Barry Jenkins; Thomas Cole, The Dead Abel; John Everett Millais, The Vale of Rest, Ophelia; Titian, Judith with the Head of Holofernes; Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat; Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey; Rembrandt van Rijn, The Return of the Prodigal Son.