Grieving Dad, 2025

I recently had my first child, and soon after, my father died suddenly, while I was still in my fourth trimester. My father was an atheist, and I have always been on a quest for truth about what lies beyond this life. Throughout my life I’ve had many strange experiences that make me wonder if there is more than what we can see. Although I am searching for answers, I remain equal parts skeptical and hopeful. Since my dad passed, a few things have happened that feel significant, but most recently they appeared in these images. I wear a lot of jewellery, and on the day I made my pinhole self-portraits this was no exception. The series was meant to explore the different stages of grief, but unexpectedly it became overshadowed by the unintentional placement of the cross from my jewellery. In the resulting photographs, the cross appears in different sizes and positions, even though I had not physically arranged myself that way during the long analogue process of making the pinhole exposures. To me, this felt like a sign. None of my family are religious, yet it struck me as some kind of communication from the other side. There was no technical or logical reason for how this occurred, so for me it goes into my personal, emotional box of “evidence” that there is something beyond this world. I hope my dad was present with me in the act of creating these pinhole images and maybe, in some way, he was.

Megan Farquhar is an Australian artist from Newcastle, NSW. Her work is deeply autobiographical and instinctual. Megan’s life was shaped by a complex upbringing, which has propelled her to interrogate belief systems and social taboos. Megan explores themes of grief, death, and altered states of consciousness through a multidisciplinary practice that spans illustration, collage, soft sculpture, animation, sewing, and alternative photographic techniques, including pinhole, cyanotype, and ultrasound imagery. Megan holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Southern Cross University, Lismore in 2010.