Between What Remains

Visual Arts Exhibition Review | Brian Rope

Between What Remains | Hilary Wardhaugh and David Manley

Belconnen Arts Centre |  27 March – 17 May 2026

The 2024 Canberra City News Artist of the Year, Hilary Wardhaugh, has again produced a wonderful collection of artworks – this time for a joint exhibition with a friend from their teenage years in Belconnen. Their surroundings influenced the visual elements they both would later use to convey their ideas and responses to the places they experienced as artists. 

David Manley has also contributed great imagery for this exhibition. His artworks often are constructed pieces – architectural models and dioramas. The two artists complement each other.

Between What Remains reflects on the lives of the two artists and their shared artistic vision. They have come together in this exhibition to present conceptually aligned bodies of work.

Manley photographically explores architectural models and historical sites that have been marked by violence. The profound influence past events and experiences have on the present and future of individuals and societies, the overwhelming nature of media in our lives today, and the rapid, decisive and forceful application of actions underpin his constructed trauma-scapes. In those quiet, speculative spaces, memories linger and collapse into the present.

Wardhaugh’s series The Disconnect also inhabits the territory of temporal rupture, but from a post-documentary urban landscape perspective. Exploring disconnection and the categorisation of the natural world in our urban landscapes, the work uses visual portrayals to contemplate puzzling things.

Curator Alexander Boynes wonderful essay in the catalogue suggests this reunion of the two artists in a renewed dialogue is shaped by their shared beginnings in Belconnen. He tells us that the developed photography practices of both artists have led to them viewing landscapes and architecture as sites of memory, rupture and return not simply as subjects.

All 21 works draw us in to stand before them, first looking closely at the elements contained in them, then thinking about the messages they are intended to convey. Messages about ecological forces, climate change, impacts on biodiversity, the consequences of human presence, the traumatic impacts, and their own perceptions and views about our responsibilities in our world.

Manley’s High Rise shows us a huge concrete edifice improbably hovering high over the surface below. We wonder how it could possibly have moved into that position, apparently weightless despite its size and composition. How it could be so light as to float there? 

High Rise, 2023. 1000mm x 1000mm. Framed pigment print – David Manley

Post-Traumatic Urbanist #2 Shows me a complex structure which might have been part of a long-gone urban settlement in what is now a barren landscape. Manley himself and others viewing the image may see something quite different.

Post-traumatic Urbanist #2, 2017. 500mm x 500mm. Framed pigment print – David Manley

Zoomorphic Cement Structure is another delightful piece. Seen from a distance it seemed to me that somehow a large cement block had moved right heading away from its purpose as a key support for the block above. Moving closer revealed I was wrong. A little research since has told me that zoomorphic architecture refers to the design and construction of buildings inspired by the forms and characteristics of animals. It embraces fluidity, dynamism, and a connection to nature. Perhaps my first interpretation resulted from fluidity.

Zoomorphic Cement Structure, 2013, 1250mm x 1000mm. Framed pigment print – David Manley

Wardhaugh’s pieces are diverse, but also complementary. Landscapes reveal terrains that have been significantly impacted by environmental stress and by decisions made, or not made, by those responsible for particular locations. In The Life of a roadside bush, the bush is a lone piece of nature in urban Queanbeyan’s concrete surroundings.

The Life of a roadside bush, 2025. 850mm x 1200mm. Framed pigment print – Hilary Wardhaugh

Danger! Nature is another most interesting piece. I invite you to look closely and interpret what you see for yourself. What are we looking at? Is it all real? Was the yellow vertical structure which neatly divides the image in two actually there in that landscape?

Danger! Nature, 2014. 850mm x 1200mm. Framed pigment print – Hilary Wardhaugh

Coercively Controlled confronts us with a view of trees being forced to grow as someone has determined they should, rather than allowing nature to take its course.

Coercively Controlled, 2025. 850mm x 1200mm. Framed pigment print – Hilary Wardhaugh

Succulent and Potty is another piece that demands our investigation. It is not simply a potted plant with thick, water-storing leaves sitting atop an interesting structure. Behind it is what might be a tall building under construction covered with translucent material.

Succulent and Potty, 2023. 850mm x 1200mm. Framed pigment print – Hilary Wardhaugh

Both artists have effectively used the cathartic power of image-making in a world marked by the human cost of disconnection, ambivalence and disruption.

This review is also available on the author's blog. A shorter review has also been published in Canberra City News.

Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize (MCPP) 2025

Photography Review | Brian Rope

Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize (MCPP) 2025 | Various artists

Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre (MRAC) | 14 August – 11 October 2025

As always, it is somewhat difficult to review an exhibition where the artworks are from numerous artists, and the only connection is that they have been selected as finalists in a competition. So, I’ll follow my practice of discussing just a selection of the exhibits, starting with the adjudicator, Antares Wells, awarded pieces.

The winner of this year’s $30,000 is a woman wearing a choker is walking in a crowd, 2024, an inkjet print on cotton rag, inkjet print on clear film 80.5 x 59.4 cm by Johanna Ng. It will be acquired and join all previous MCPP winners in MRAC’s permanent collection of post-war contemporary paintings, ceramic and photography. The prizemoney amount puts this event amongst the major Australian photographic contests.

The work traces what the artist describes as “the parallel erasure of Asian identities in computer vision and network television.” She captured screenshots of Asian bodies then photographed them into new compositions. In this winning image, an Asian woman becomes “a woman” and “a woman” conjures the image of a white one. 

Johanna Ng - a woman wearing a choker is walking in a crowd, 2024

Wells also named two Highly Commended works. They were Miho Watanabe’s Awareness of Between-ness: A Day After My Father’s Departure – Self-Portrait in His Room on His Chair, 2025, and Mungo Howard’s Studio Window, 2025. Watanabe’s artwork is delightful – a self-portrait, taken the day after his father died. Transferred onto silk using a phototransfer technique, the image will gradually fade, mirroring how memory dissolves with time and evoking the quiet passage between presence and absence. I hope I’ll have an opportunity to view this artwork again when that fading has advanced significantly. 

Miho Watanabe - Awareness of Between-ness: A Day After My Father’s Departure – Self-Portrait in His Room on His Chair, 2025

Mungo Howard - Studio Window, 2025

Let me now comment on just a few of the other finalist works in the exhibition. Hilary Wardhaugh is amongst them for the second year running; this time with her work Dad’s Last Swim, 2024.

The artist statement tells us that before scattering her dad’s ashes into the waves at his favourite beach she made a lumen 'portrait' of him using the ashes. She then washed the paper in the sea, leaving sand where his ashes had lain. Wardhaugh always remembers “Dad being sandy and salty at the beach after swimming.” I have no doubt her family will enjoy this clever artwork about Dad for all time. 

Hilary Wardhaugh - Dad's Last Swim, 2024

I must mention Angus Brown’s Torqued Image Object 1, 2024. How many of us who print our images have mounted them on a rolled aluminium sheet? I certainly haven’t. Brown has done that with this pearl-finished silver gelatin print. He tells us that “In an effort to stretch the conventions of image-making outside the flat pictorial plane, I employ the operations of sculpture into the field of photography……. Maintaining the logic of image making, whilst speaking the language of sculpture, these blended outcomes have come to be known as ‘image-object’.”

Angus Brown - Torqued Image Object 1, 2024

There are many other interesting artworks in this exhibition, including Carolyn Craig’s Re/mediate, 2024, which is screen-printed charcoal dust on paper. And Tamara Voninski’s Chemo Decay: Sun Ritual, 2025, a photographic lightbox. She exposed images from her chemotherapy-induced dreams to the same chemo cancer drugs that drip into her veins during treatment.

Carolyn Craig - Re/mediate, 2024

 

Tamara Voninski - Chemo Decay: Sun Ritual, 2025

When reviewing the 2024 MCPP, I said that I considered it to be the best one yet overall. This 2025 exhibition is considerably better again.

All the selected finalists and their accompanying artist statements can be seen in a virtual gallery here. However, it would be a much better experience to visit the MRAC and see the finished artworks up close if you possibly can do so.

A longer review is available on the author's blog here and in the December 25 issue of The Printer here.

2025 National Photographic Portrait Prize

Exhibition Review: Photography | Brian Rope

2025 National Photographic Portrait Prize | Various Artists

National Portrait Gallery, Canberra | 16 August – 12 October 2025

Then touring nationally - Cairns, Mount Gambier, Geraldton & Horsham | between 6 December 2025 & 26 January 2027

Now in its 18th year, the National Photographic Portrait Prize supports and celebrates photographic portraiture in Australia. There are many great works in this exhibition of finalists, only some of which I will discuss here.

The winner for 2025 is Untitled #01 (from the series Code Black/Riot) 2024 by Hoda Afshar, a Naarm/Melbourne-based visual artist whose practice focuses on the intricate relationships between politics and aesthetics, knowledge and representation, visibility and violence. All participants in the series were invited to use a means of their own choosing to conceal their identities while making a personal statement. The three First Nations youngsters in this image chose to conceal their faces to avoid being identified by the youth justice system.

Untitled #01 (from the series Code Black/Riot) 2024 © Hoda Afshar

 

When we viewed the exhibition, both my companion and I observed that there were numerous images of (and by) members of the LGBTQIA+ and Indigenous Australian communities. Amongst them is Hilary Wardhaugh’s Zev and Nick, 2025, their relationship revealed partly by the image and also by the accompanying artist statement. Mary-Lou Orliyarli Divilli’s Langi, 2024, is a portrait of her niece Violet, which “personifies the pride that goes with belonging, skills, knowing about your heritage and living within your culture.” Gerwyn Davies is a queer artist who works across photography, textile, and costume. He takes a “performative approach to photographic portraiture, exploring self-representation, camp aesthetics and kitsch Australiana.” His Bather, 2024, is a delightful example of that.

Zev and Nick, 2025 © Hilary Wardhaugh

Langi, 2024 © Mary-Lou Orliyarli Divilli

 

Bather, 2024 © Gerwyn Davies

T W Baker’s image Waiting on the Wet, 2024 has an interesting back story. It was taken in between massive afternoon downpours. A roll of Italian, medium-format cinema film jammed in Baker’s camera, but he managed to salvage and store it in a light-tight pouch away from the brutal sun and humidity. Two days later that pouch was opened by a curious member of the Darwin Airport security team. A week later, after processing the film in Sydney, it appeared that the harsh Top End of Australia had left its mark.

Waiting on the wet, 2024 © T W Baker

Jennie Groom’s Lola in utero, 2024 is a very different image of pregnancy. Indeed, a most unusual portrait. It is both clever and effective, a fine monochrome study.

Lola in utero, 2024 © Jennie Groom

 

Laura Zviedre’s Hands, 2024 is a delightful portrayal of a child - one of his hands holding his parents’ hands whilst his other one rests on his mother’s growing belly. It is all about love.

Hands, 2024 © Laura Zviedre

Back in 1995, Raoul Slater and his father Peter produced a lavishly illustrated book, Photographing Australia's Birds. More recently, he has been working in the medium of wet plate collodion, the pre-eminent photographic technology of the 1860s. His selected finalist work Muni, 2024 is a fine example of that medium.

Muni, 2024 - Raoul Slater

There are two other artworks that I found myself studying for lengthy periods of time. Michael Cook’s Individuation – Persona 2024 and Dida Sundet’s Philomela 2024. Cook’s works interrogate the legacy of colonisation and invite viewers to experience roles in reversal and histories re-written. This particular artwork ponders his life and that of his friend and artistic collaborator, Joey Gala. It recreates a scene from Greco-Roman mythology that depicts rape and is my favourite work in the exhibition. Through feminist intervention, it “alters perspective and challenges established gendered tropes.” Again, there is so much to see – movement in the woman’s arms, cyanotypes in the fabric, a toy held by a hand under the food-laden structure, and much more.

Individuation - Persona, 2024 © Michael Cook

Philomela, 2024 © Dida Sundet

Overall, this is a splendid exhibition, perhaps the best selection of finalists yet in this annual major Prize. Whilst we do not know what other works were amongst the thousands not selected (except for our own if we entered), the judges are to be commended for their 48 choices – all of which can be seen online here.

A longer review is available on the author's blog here and in the December 25 issue of The Printer (pp 16-22) here.

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You Cannot Trust an Open Sky

Visual Art Exhibition Review | Brian Rope

You Cannot Trust an Open Sky | Hilary Wardhaugh (and featuring Tarek Bakri)

ANCA Gallery | 16 July to 3 August 2025

This exhibition is a body of work responding to what the International Court of Justice has called a ‘plausible genocide’ of the people of Palestine.

Ever since hearing Hilary Wardhaugh proclaim, to laughter, when opening her 2024 exhibition, Monachopsis, it was the start of her new career as an artist, I have watched her take numerous steps along that path. She was named 2024 Canberra City News Artist of the Year, Canberra Critics Circle judges having noted her provocative, innovative and creative art endeavours. And this year alone, she has been named as a finalist in several major Prize events. 

Wardhaugh actually considers herself an artist, activist/provocateur, volunteer and creator of community, saying her creative endeavours bring people together in the pursuit of a better world, and she pursues topical and creative projects to highlight issues. This exhibition certainly highlights a current issue.

The works includes documentary photography, analogue and digitised lumen prints, and film photography made between November 2023 and the end of 2024. The artist was inspired by Maranasati meditation - reflecting on mortality to foster appreciation and mindfulness in daily life. That inspiration led to her visualising responses to, and contemplating on, the nature of death. Using meticulous stencil work, multiple lumen prints (also known as solar photograms) were made. This hands-on, slow, and organic photo-making process helped Wardhaugh with challenges she faced when scrolling reports of the conflict on her phone and via mainstream media.

Amongst the works is one collaborative piece. Two framed inkjet prints of night sky photographs – one above Canberra by Wardhaugh and one above Jerusalem by Tarek Bakri – are presented as a diptych. There is considerable similarity in the two prints. Together they invite reflection about experiencing life in a situation of occupation and fear.

Bakri is a Palestinian-born researcher based in Jerusalem. Moved by the nostalgia and emotion held by many Palestinians for their former homes, he developed the idea of documenting their personal stories and displaced Palestinian villages using visual documentation.  An ongoing project “We Were and Still Are... Here” began. He received the 2018 Jerusalem Award for Culture and Creativity and has held exhibitions and seminars in Palestine, the Arab World, and Europe. He believes that memory is identity and an undeniable human right.

Hilary Wardhaugh & Tarek Bakri, You Cannot Trust An Open Sky, 2025

Another work is a set of four metallic prints on woodblock of the colours of the Palestine flag. Wardhaugh is not the first artist to portray these “forbidden colours.” In 1988, Felix Gonzalez-Torres did so; during another period of continuous destruction of Palestine, artists were tested, even forbidden. This work, like his then, envisages a canvas of repair and emphasises colour attuned to light as possibility, urging solidarity with those affected by loss and war. 

Hilary Wardhaugh, Forbidden Colours, 2024, four metallic prints on woodblock, 50 x 180cm overall 

A number of artworks make use of dots. A suite of 5 inkjet prints portrays the ever-diminishing land for Palestinians in Gaza. As with the Forbidden Colours piece, it uses the watermelon symbol of Palestinian unity. Each watermelon slice has fewer dots than the previous one. Another piece, based on an aerial map of Gaza, illustrates the destruction. Dots mark the obliterated areas, providing a deeply felt record of loss.

Hilary Wardhaugh, Gaza Stripped, 2024, framed inkjet print, 59 x 42cm

Another most striking work comprises a suite of 16 inkjet prints of photographs of empty bowls on a digitised lumen of a keffiyeh (traditional headdress worn by men), suspended above the smashed pieces of those bowls. It symbolises the futility of seeking food to honour the Eid religious holiday, celebrated by Muslims worldwide to mark the end of Ramadan. The distinctly patterned black-and-white Palestinian keffiyeh symbolises nationalism and resistance.

Hilary Wardhaugh, Empty Eid Aid, 2024, inkjet prints and ceramics, 240 x 240 x 100cm

Wardhaugh hopes the artworks create some shared understanding and influence public opinion. I have no doubt they will.

This review has also been published on the author's blog here. And an abbreviated version has been published on Canberra City News here.

Canberra Contemporary Photographic Prize 2024

Exhibition Review: Photography | Brian Rope

Canberra Contemporary Photographic Prize 2024 | Various Artists

Photo Access, Canberra | 13 - 29 June 2024 

The 2024 Canberra Contemporary Photographic Prize is a competition and exhibition open to all photo-artists worldwide, aiming to highlight fresh viewpoints in Contemporary photography. 

The inaugural 2023 Prize exhibited all 72 submitted works, some of which I believed were not Contemporary works. This year, 198 entries were received from local and distant places, including the USA. There are fifty finalists, roughly half being women and half being men. The overall quality of the Contemporary works selected is excellent. The three judges - Sandy Barnard - The Master, Sandy Prints, Oscar Capezio - Curator, ANU Drill Hall and Janice Falsone - Director, CCAS - must have had a most difficult task choosing them. The prize-winners they selected would not, of course, be everyone’s choices, but both are certainly Contemporary and deserving of recognition.

Melbourne-based Lisa Jayne Cramer took second prize with an inkjet print She carries his grief (self-portrait), 2024.  The artist statement accompanying the work says it all - From my series, ‘YOUR child, MY child, EVERYONE'S Child’, to express how grief makes demands on us, that she carries his grief. A very silent, personal journey into grief for a child that never happened, proposing dense ideas about a reformulated family structure.

She carries his grief (self-portrait), 2024 © Lisa Jayne Cramer

More of Cramer’s work can be seen at https://www.lisajaynecramer.com/ and @lisajaynecramer.

Now Sydney-based, Caleb Arcifa whose work has been seen previously in View 2024, Photo Access’s annual showcase of emerging photo-media artists from the ACT and surrounding regions, took out the first prize with a giclee enlargement from a silver gelatin original. It has the intriguing title Sonant Autograph of Joini (If I Ain’t Got You), 2023. Some of you will be familiar with the Alicia Keys track If I Ain’t Got You with its deep meaning lyrics and draw parallels.

The artist statement accompanying the work reveals that sound has been used to augment the photographic process, the print being 'signed' by the sitter’s unique sonic identity. It suggests that the portrait captures more than a visual likeness, questioning the notion of self in this Artificial Intelligence age. It describes the portrait as ephemeral, which means lasting a very short time. Let’s hope it doesn’t disappear before the exhibition closes!

I couldn’t find much about Arcifa on the web, but he is on Instagram as @thecontainerlab where I learned he is designing and fabricating a collaborative photo/design studio, darkroom/print lab and workshop in multiple freight containers.

Sonant Autograph of Joini (If I Ain’t Got You), 2023 © Caleb Arcifa

I only have space to mention two other finalists. Sydney resident Orlando Luminere has a passion for helping others develop their photography, including by setting up a photography department in a training college. His entry is a fine example of photography using a camera obscura he constructed from urban waste materials. I’ve known this artist and his artwork for a very long time and own a copy of his book about iPhone photography. I’ve participated in an online workshop watching him construct a camera obscura. One day I must have a crack at making one myself.

Souvenirs, 2024 © Orlando Luminere

The current arts practice project of Canberra’s Hilary Wardhaugh includes works created in response to feeling absolutely helpless and powerless to change the inhumane narrative of the International Criminal Court’s ‘plausible genocide’ in Gaza. She hopes her artworks resonate with others, creating a sense of shared understanding. A Meditation of Death, 2024, is part of that project - a solemn tribute to 24,000 lives lost in Gaza by 3 January 2024. Each of twelve lumen prints has approximately 2000 dots capturing the essence of those who died, inviting viewers to reflect on the profound impact of violence and loss. The major process involved in creating all those dots is detailed on Wardhaugh’s website here. If you purchase a copy from the artist, she will donate a significant amount to UNHCR in your name.

A Meditation of Death, 2024 © Hilary Wardhaugh

Congratulations to Photo Access and all the finalists.

This review is also available on the author's blog here.

MONACHOPSIS

Exhibition Review: Photography | Brian Rope

MONACHOPSIS | Hilary Wardhaugh

CCAS Manuka | 14 – 24 March 2024

Speaking at the opening of her exhibition, local long-established career professional photographer, Hilary Wardhaugh, announced it was the first step in her new career as an artist. There was much laughter and positive response to that. Having long believed artists can emerge later in their life journeys – without undertaking formal tertiary art studies – I was delighted.

Wardhaugh has been capturing images for around 27 years, specialising in portrait, event, editorial and branding photography. But now, she proclaimed, a separate artist career was also underway.

In fact, this photographer’s website states that, more than a photographer, she considers herself an artist, activist/provocateur, volunteer and creator of community. It says her creative endeavours bring people together in the pursuit of a better world, her interest involves the human condition: irony and contradiction - and she also pursues topical and creative projects to highlight a theme or an issue, most recently climate change.

Wardhaugh has curated many projects involving women and photography; for example, Loud and Luminous (with Mel Anderson as co-Creator) and most recently a climate change project, The #everydayclimatecrisis Visual Petition, which achieved global recognition. Those projects have clearly demonstrated this photographer is an artist, activist, etc.

So this artist is very passionate about using photography as activism and demonstrating that through artistic, provocative and innovative means. And that is just what she is doing with this solo exhibition.

I had not previously heard the word monachopsis so turned to online sources seeking its meaning. I learned it is a new word, coined by writer John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It describes the feeling of being maladapted to your surroundings, like a seal on a beach. Monachopsis is temporary for most people and diminishes when the unfamiliar becomes familiar and new routines and unknown faces become norms.

I now know I have personally experienced monachopsis as a result of being in a new and not familiar situation. I’m sure everyone else has had the same type of experience. But have we had quite the type of experience Wardhaugh has put before us here?

The journey that has culminated in this exhibition actually began in June 2016 when Wardhaugh saw the Queanbeyan River’s bank was littered with what she has described as “the detritus of the capitalist Anthropocene era”, and as a “grim testament to our collective negligence.” The sight stirred within her “a potent blend of horror and introspection.”

However, these exhibited artworks were created later. Wardhaugh visited Indonesia’s Bintan Island, and Greece’s Santorini. Again, the artist saw vast quantities of waste on beaches. I only saw pristine beaches on those two islands when I visited them many years ago; clearly our personal experiences depend on where we go and when.

So, this exhibition of artworks by this emerging artist is very much a response to experiences, revealing her hope that nature might reclaim those beaches.

Portrait of a discarded plastic sunscreen bottles cultivated by molluscs on Bintan © Hilary Wardhaugh

Feral car reclaimed by prickly pear on Santorini © Hilary Wardhaugh

Derelict building spoiling the natural landscape on Santorini © Hilary Wardhaugh

The artist has also created a site-specific artwork, placing digital copies of waste objects she found onto a long decal laid on the gallery floor. Her aim was to make exhibition visitors reflect on their responsibility to our planet. During the opening numerous visitors unintentionally walked on that artwork.

There is a very large print filling the entire end wall of the gallery space. And there is to be a closing ticketed event with composer @ruthleemartin who has created three new pieces of music in response to the exhibition.

Everything in this splendid exhibition encourages reflection about human impact on the environment. It transports us into that unsettling place to which monachopsis refers. Wardhaugh’s belief that art can provoke valuable conversations and lead to meaningful action underpins her purpose. And she has most successfully achieved what she set out to do.

This review (in an abbreviated form) was first published by Canberra City News on 17 March 2024 here. It is also available on the author's blog here.

Pictures of You

Photography | Brian Rope

Pictures of You | Hilary Wardhaugh

Belconnen Arts Centre | 2–17 December 2022, & 17 January - 5 February 2023

In 2017, Canberran John Brookes was given three months to live. He reached out to an artist to paint a memorial portrait. He is still going five years later and intends to continue for the foreseeable future!

Along the way, Brookes established Canberry Communications - a non-profit that supports communities including those with mental and/or physical disability. It develops arts projects in a range of media for small charities who may not otherwise have the resources to implement them. It believes strongly in giving a voice, enabling people to tell their own stories in unique and thought-provoking ways - looking beyond their 'issues' to the whole person.

This exhibition is the first outcome of one such arts project. Undertaken in collaboration with photographer Hilary Wardhaugh and the Belconnen Arts Centre, it was launched along with a number of other art exhibitions, each celebrating ageing or disability, on the eve of International Day of Persons with Disabilities, held worldwide annually to observe and highlight issues that affect people with disabilities.

More than a photographer, Wardhaugh is an artist, activist/provocateur, volunteer and creator of community. Her creative endeavours bring people together in the pursuit of a better world. Her interests involve the human condition: frailty, irony, contradiction. And she pursues topical and creative projects to highlight themes and issues reflecting those conditions.

Pictures of You takes a unique approach to portraying people with lived experience of being disabled or of being mental health consumers. Each person collaborated as equals with Wardhaugh to produce their portraits honestly reflecting them as whole persons and not just ‘consumers’ – a process that had surprising and inspirational results, both for the subjects and the artist.

The collaborations asked a question - have you ever tried to explain how it is to be YOU? To a friend, a partner, your family, a professional – even to yourself? Now it asks us to imagine having a disability or being a mental health consumer, to think about the prejudices that come with that, and the challenges of engaging people to look beyond our imagined disability to the whole of our personalities.

It is suggested, correctly, that an image: a single depiction of mood, hopes, fears, strengths and personality, can say so much more than words. Imagine having an image that is YOU, that sums up who and what you are, a source of pride that you can keep, display and say…“this is me.”

This is the focus of the Pictures of You exhibition, a modest yet important show highlighting that people with disabilities and mental health consumers are equal to everyone else, have as much to offer and give as the rest of us, are people to be admired and loved just as much as every other person. They have feelings, they have skills and talents, they can do all sorts of things. There are images of individuals and one group shot of some talented, determined, enthusiastic, and absolutely impressive people with disability in the Rebus Theatre family.

Most, perhaps all, of the people portrayed in Wardhaugh’s artworks were present at the opening and gladly lined up for group shots with the artist and others. It was wonderful to see the people alongside their portraits. Bruno would probably have loved to play his guitar for everyone in the large crowd.

Bruno Cirillo © Hilary Wardhaugh

The Rebus folk no doubt would also have loved to perform show their talents.

Rebus © Hilary Wardhaugh

Go take a look and ask yourself who these portrayed people are.

Arto © Hilary Wardhaugh

Eleanor Waight © Hilary Wardhaugh

Glen © Hilary Wardhaugh

Melissa Hammond © Hilary Wardhaugh

Some other photographic artworks amongst the companion exhibitions are also well worth seeing. Indeed, I encourage you to see all the exhibitions.

This review was first published online by The Canberra Times here and then printed on 10/12/22. It is also available on the author's blog here.