Portrait of mother and daughter
2008
This collaborative work by Concettina Inserra and Nat Thomas forms part of their series, After Mirka, which is made up of portraits that show the artists wearing face-paint alongside other family members. The portraits were inspired by a story about the artist Mirka Mora painting her face with zinc cream and mascara one particularly dull Sunday afternoon at her beach house in Aspendale in the early 1960s. The monstrous-looking Mora was photographed interacting with her family by Roger Whitaker, and one of Whitaker’s pictures later appeared on the cover of the iconic underground magazine, Oz. This anecdote presents a wonderful account of the avant-garde artist-mother using play and masquerade to disrupt the tedium of conservative, suburban life in Melbourne. Inserra and Thomas have appropriated the design of the face-paint worn by Mora to similarly disturb dominant ideas of family and domestic life. In this unconventional portrait of a mother and daughter, Thomas’s child seems uncomfortable in the presence of her monstrous mother.
With this work, Inserra and Thomas won the 2008 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize.
(2020)
Chromogenic prints are printed on paper that has at least three emulsion layers containing invisible dyes and silver salts. Each emulsion layer is sensitive to a different primary colour of light (red, green or blue). The development process converts the hidden dyes to visible colour depending on the amount of light it was exposed to. This type of paper is commonly used to print from colour negatives or digital files to produce a full-colour image. It can also be used to print black-and-white images, giving softer grain and less contrast than gelatin silver prints. Commonly known as c-type prints, chromogenic processing was developed in the 1940s and widely used for colour printing, including for domestic snapshots. While recent years have seen this process accompanied by ink-jet and digital printing technologies, chromogenic printing still remains in use to this day.
