Tag: conceptual portraiture

Faye Johansen’s practice begins with attention to nature, to material, and to the quiet traces things leave behind. Working across watercolour, collage, and handmade journals, she builds surfaces that carry both process and place. At the centre of her work is a powerful series of one hundred charcoal portraits of Indigenous children, drawn onto discarded books layered with torn maps, music notation, and fragments of text. Each material holds meaning, speaking to displacement, memory, and loss, while charcoal allows the faces to remain both present and fragile. Alongside this, her journals…

Rooted in the body and shaped by constant movement between cultures, Helena Barbagelata’s work resists categorisation. Her images don’t offer answers, they confront the viewer with presence, vulnerability, and the cost of never landing.