Fairy in the classroom II (A)

This is from a series of portraits I painted for an exhibition called 'The People of the School', a series of portraits of adults and children who were part of a remote Aboriginal school community I used to visit in my work as a teacher educator. This image was from the annual book week where the kids would throw themselves into dressing up as characters from books and films. This small girl from the Transition/Reception class was watching the others finish getting dressed up before they all went on the parade around the main streets of the community. I loved the contrast with her fairy-ness and the work of the handwriting lesson that had just been completed and glimpsed on the desk on which she leans (fairies have to go to school too!). Her sense of expectancy as she looks over at the others really drew me in.

Follow

I was born in 1967 in the west of England and came to Australia with my husband in 1998, settling in Alice Springs in 2000. After completing a BA and a PhD in Literature, and a period with the British Foreign Office, I began teaching in 1995, which I’ve been doing ever since.

I paint in oils and while I have no formal training, I have developed my practice over the years through my involvement with the Central Australian Art Society and Studio 12 artists’ collective (life-drawing, plein-air painting, exhibiting).

I’m fascinated by the identity of things, what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called their ‘inscape,’ the internal power that holds the elements together and makes the thing unique. My paintings are an attempt to represent the moment of glimpsing or ‘catching’ the inscape of the thing, be it a skyline, a person or a camel. They also explore the way light works both to shape and to convey identity and feeling. The quality of the light in central Australia still astonishes me after years here.