Sunflower Still Life - Love to Van Gogh 65cm Edition Ed. 4 of 25

Months ago I tilled the soil in front of my house and planted sunflower seeds. This week they came into their own, and I can't help but notice the smiles on the faces of people passing by. How could I not harvest a few of them to immortalise in an artwork? It's hard for me to keep things simple, I like to have lots of hidden layers going on in my artwork...but I also wanted to pay homage to Van Gogh's sunflower work: imagining that he may have set up something very similar all those years ago. I have used my mother's 100+ year old ceramic pot as the vase, and have incorporated various butterflies and bees into the work. In reality, the sunflowers call so many of these insects to them daily - it's pollination heaven :-)

This is a photographic artwork. I photograph each element myself and then carefully bring everything together in post-production. I hand paint with light and shadow to give the rich, painterly feel to my work. I oversee the printing of each piece in the edition, printed by a master printer, and sign each artwork.

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Lauren Starr is an Australian photo-media artist whose work explores women’s stories through history, folklore, fairytale, and the Australian landscape. Drawing on colonial histories, personal ancestry, and mythic archetypes, she creates narrative works that reimagine the past through a contemporary lens.

Working with staged photography, painterly textures, and digital compositing, Starr constructs richly layered images that sit between reality and myth. Her practice is particularly concerned with memory, inheritance, belonging, and the ways women’s lives become embedded within landscape.

Recent bodies of work have explored female narratives from the Victorian goldfields, acts of re-wilding and reclamation, and the enduring relationship between women, story, and place.

Starr is the recipient of the 2022 Bluethumb Art Prize (Photography Category and Grand Prize). Her work has been acquired by Parliament House Melbourne and Bendigo Art Gallery, and has been recognised through the Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize, Olive Cotton Award, Head On Photo Awards, and other national exhibitions.