When I was at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra the other week, I was walking through the galleries and saw my mother looking back at me through a glass plinth.
This work was inspired by my mother’s Carta d’Identita – her Italian Identity card. The photo was taken of of her at the same age that I found it. I realised at that time she made so many decisions in her life – she chose to come to Australia, she then met my father and then I was born here in this new country.
And this is the artwork that I made in the year after third year, my beginnings as an artists a very early opportunity to be part of a print folio which was organised by Robert Jacks and involved some great artists Steve Turpie, Peter D’Cole and Robert Jacks.
I reduced my mother’s identity card to a black and white. Then added the Venus de Milo and the graphic symbol and the red finger print is my own imposed on my mother’s idenitity.