The story behind an award-winning painting, from the first pieces of collage to the finished work
I was absolutely delighted to learn that She Wears Her Story had been awarded the People’s Choice Award at the 2026 Rotary Club of Hobart Art Show.
With more than 400 artworks in the exhibition, knowing that visitors had stopped in front of her, looked closely at all those tiny details and ultimately chosen this painting as their favourite meant an enormous amount to me.
Perhaps it felt particularly special because She Wears Her Story represents a direction in my work that has become increasingly important to me — combining oil painting with collage to create paintings that are not only beautiful to look at, but hold stories within their layers.
So I thought I’d take you back to where she began.
Building a dress from fragments
The dress began quite literally as pieces of paper.
I collected fragments of old handwriting, book pages, music, florals, vintage imagery and other beautiful papers, then cut and tore them into shapes and began building the dress directly onto the canvas.
At this early stage, it can look rather strange! There are pieces of paper everywhere, areas of bare canvas and very little to suggest how the finished painting will eventually come together.
But this is one of my favourite parts of the process.
I don’t necessarily want every piece of collage to remain clearly visible in the finished painting. Some pieces will almost disappear beneath layers of oil paint. Others will be partially obscured. And occasionally, a tiny detail survives almost untouched.
I love that element of discovery.
When the paper becomes paint
Once the collage is in place, the painting really begins.
I paint back into and over the papers, adding shadows and highlights and gradually creating the folds, weight and movement of the fabric.
Some areas are softened with paint. Others are darkened considerably. I might cover a piece I originally loved because the dress needs a shadow there, or wipe paint away again to reveal a glimpse of handwriting or a flower underneath.
The challenge is making all those individual pieces stop looking like paper attached to a canvas and begin to feel like one flowing dress.
It becomes a constant conversation between what I want to reveal and what I’m willing to lose.
And slowly, the fragments begin to belong together.
The stories we carry
There is something about this way of working that has come to mean much more to me than simply creating pattern and texture.
Each little fragment feels almost like a memory — a place, a person, an experience, a joy, a loss, a chapter of a life.
Some remain vivid. Some become softened with time. Some are almost completely hidden, but they’re still there beneath the surface.
And perhaps that is really what She Wears Her Story is about.
We are all made up of so many pieces.
The things that have happened to us. The people we have loved. The places we’ve been. The things we’ve lost. The things we’ve learned. The beautiful moments and the difficult ones.
We carry them with us.
And somehow, together, they become us.
A painting that invited people to look closer
One of the loveliest things I heard during the Rotary exhibition was that people were spending time looking closely at the painting and discovering more and more within the dress.
That is exactly what I hope for with these works.
From a distance, I want you to see the woman and the movement of her dress. But when you come closer, another world begins to appear — handwriting, flowers, old pages, patterns and tiny fragments you may not have noticed at first.
There are stories within the story.
To then discover that She Wears Her Story had been chosen for the People’s Choice Award was incredibly special.
Judged awards are wonderful, of course, but there is something quite different about knowing that the people walking through an exhibition simply connected with a painting and chose it as the one they loved.
For a work that is ultimately about the stories we all carry, that connection feels especially fitting.
Looking back now at these early photographs — at the bare canvas, scattered pieces of paper and half-formed dress — it’s rather wonderful to see where she began.
And I think she may have taught me something too.
Sometimes all those seemingly unrelated pieces really can become something beautiful.
She Wears Her Story
Oil and collage on canvas
24 × 48 inches
People’s Choice Award — Rotary Club of Hobart Art Show, 2026