Wendy Sharpe is one of Australia’s most awarded artists, painting in genres that include portraiture, parody and allegory. As a muralist, Sharpe has completed several large-scale installations across Sydney including The Women’s Empowerment Mural in Newtown, the Annette Kellerman Murals in College Street, and Vu iz dos Gesele (Where is the Little Street)? at the Jewish Museum.
Sharpe’s mural for Rockhampton Museum of Art takes its title from a line in the Argentinian-Swiss writer Jorge Luis Borges’ poem, All Our Yesterdays (1973-74). Borges references the past and his identity across generations and geography. Likewise, in Sharpe’s artwork, a central figure (resembling Sharpe) is accompanied by what the artist describes interchangeably as ‘perhaps ancestral ghosts, perhaps creatures, perhaps monsters’ floating above and around her.
Unlike a painting on canvas or a drawing on paper, a mural painted directly onto a wall carries defined limitations to its time and place.
Wendy Sharpe: I Am All Those Who Are No More, 2024, Rockhampton Museum of Art.
12 July | An Evening with Wendy Sharpe