Seven Point Six Million

This series of works was developed during the pandemic using a custom system of lettering I designed, and each painting encodes a message through this typographic tool. The first work spells out 7.6 Million — the number of Australians in 2020 who were born overseas, many of whom were 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 strange sense of rapid manifestation that defined the pandemic experience. Each triptych was painted in three different colour arrangements to further emphasise the ideas of recurrence, variation and emotional fluctuation.

The colour system is drawn from the separation of white light into red, green and blue, and their overlap to form cyan, magenta and yellow. Here, colour becomes a metaphor for separation itself, and suggests that distance and fragmentation, while painful, can also produce new perspectives and a rich spectrum of emotions. I wanted the work to be both an acknowledgment of separation grief and a small offering of colour, reflection and quiet solidarity.