With the Sunman

In this work I openly wear my heart on my sleeve. It is a totally self indulgent piece about my memories of growing up at our family holiday beach house on Sunman Street, in a coastal town of South Australia called Goolwa.

With the inclusion of scanned images I took as a teenager and a photo taken by my childhood photographic hero my Opa, my muse ‘Dolly’ finds herself at the centre of pictorially assimilated lived experiences, embodying the childhood idealisations of my desirable European heritage - my mother. It’s about a nostalgic time as a young child spent playing in this rugged open landscape of salt bush, sand and limestone, sculpted by the sweeping winds that came directly off the great southern ocean. These vast empty house blocks of this new suburban frontier became my secret garden, paths to new lands and held a night sky that stored countless stars to wish upon. All this, concurrently overlayed with the detached nostalgia of a young teenager, propagated by the juxtaposition of my Australian cultural experiences and a curated family narrative of a former lifestyle from across the seas.