Portrait of a woman ‘Rosa’ illustrated in gouache on Bainbridge Board.

This work is part of Mandy Martin’s 1978-1979 ‘Queanbeyan Series’. On moving from Adelaide to Queanbeyan in 1978, Mandy Martin gradually came to know a circle of young women, newly married like herself, who had come to the little cul-de-sac to start their own families. Some had recently migrated, while others had grown up in the tight-knit Italian community of the Canberra region.

As Martin explored her new surroundings, she always carried two cameras, one loaded with black and white film and one with colour. With their permission, she took portraits of these women so that she could start to make paintings and screen-prints that would express their shared suburban experience.