7.6 No.3

About This Work

This series of works was developed during the pandemic using a custom typographic system I designed, with each painting containing a written message. The repeated figure ‘7.6’ refers to the 7.6 million Australians who were born overseas in 2020. For a lot of people, the pandemic meant being separated from their families and home countries for almost two years due to border closures.

Across the series, the number 7.6 appears once, twice and eight times. This repetition references both the monotony of lockdown, and the sense of rapid manifestation as things evolved and changed during the pandemic. Each triptych was painted in three different colour combinations to further emphasise the ideas of repetition and emotional intensity experienced at the time.

The colour system comes from the separation of white light into red, green and blue, and their overlap to form cyan, magenta, yellow and black. I used these colours as a metaphor for separation itself, and to highlight that distance and isolation, although sometimes painful, can also produce new perspectives and a rich array of emotions. I wanted these paintings to be both an acknowledgment of separation grief, and a small offering of colour and solidarity to those who were also struggling during that bleak time.