This painting is about the time I spent living in our first home in Regent St, Maitland. I lived in this house for seven years between 1999 and 2007. I got married in the backyard of this house and this was the house I brought my babies home to. My memories of living in this house are so alive with the messiness and intense love and absorption of being a new mother. In my mind, I hold a narrative of that time and I have organised the imagery in the painting by time, using each layer of the painting to tell a ‘chapter’ in the narrative. The earlier events are in the earlier layers so that the past recedes. I have abstracted my memories and mental images, using symbolism and motif.

The past of the painting itself, also recedes. I think about the time based nature of life and this is reflected in the time based activity of making a painting.

Bianca Vern-Barnett is an artist based in the Hunter Valley, Australia. She is the winner of the 2024 Hunter Emerging Art Prize for painting and will exhibit a new body of work in her first solo show at Straitjacket Artspace, Newcastle in September. In 2023, her work was selected as a finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize, The Hornsby Art Prize and the Newcastle Club Foundation Painting Prize.
Vern-Barnett creates abstract works which use layers to depict the chronology of a variety of historical, cultural, and personal narratives. She is a graduate of UNSW College of Fine Arts.