Merilyn Fairskye's portraits
Portraiture has always had significant social and historical functions in our society and, in particular, has been crucial to the imaging of Australian identity. Historically, one of the few Australian artists who had a far sighted perception of portraiture as a vehicle in the development of a national consciousness was Tom Roberts. This passionately held conviction led him, during the 1890s, to paint as many 'representative' figures as possible. His efforts towards a gallery of Australian "familiar faces and figures" included composer Marshall Hall; politicians, Alfred Hill and Andrew Garran; poet Arthur Adams and parliamentarian the Hon. John Douglas. Roberts believed in the historical significance of the portrait series, writing ... "that the interest of such a collection, if broken up, would be to a great extent lost, especially when one considers how interesting such a group would be to us now, of similar types of say fifty years ago."1
One hundred years after Roberts' portrait series another Australian artist, Merilyn Fairskye, has embarked upon her own portrait series. Fairskye has completed the first stage of a project towards mapping 2000 portrait types. Her intention is that by the year 2000 she will have collected 2000 portraits which, as a group, will be a mass portrait. By imaging people from a wide range of countries and occupations the work will reflect the new population face with which Australia will move forward into the 21st century.
One might consider these two projects as discourses surrounding the redefinition of nationalism – in the 1890s towards Federation and in the 1990s towards the centenary of Federation. While Roberts' series was predicated on the notion of objectivity – that portraits could somehow represent ‘national... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline