Hands: Mrs Wallace and Mr Stuart

This is one of a series of three portraits of respected Aboriginal artist, educator and custodian Kathleen Kemarre Wallace. I was fortunate to spend time with Mrs Wallace on country and in a mutual friend's studio, where this image is set. She is painting a work that responds to the controversial Alice Springs statue of 19th Century explorer John McDouall Stuart and the words are her explanation of her painting. I wanted to convey her gentle strength, and her commitment to sharing her extensive cultural knowledge with future generations.

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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.