In My Head a Village Grew, 2023

This painting is part of a series of works about the imagined interior life of my beloved Nana Chrisoula, and the small village she grew up in, in Northern Greece. She left the village when she was sixteen, during Nazi occupation, and found a home in Australia. It must have been a traumatic experience, to live under occupation and to flee. Nana would not talk about the village, only saying there was nothing there, not even electricity, only goat tracks. When my daughter visited the village last year and met family there, the images she sent back of the village were so different to what I had imagined. I realised that I had, since childhood, created an entire village in my head, along with characters and relatives who I had heard about but never met. This painting is about that imagined village.

Bianca Vern-Barnett is an artist based in the Hunter Valley of NSW.

She makes paintings which use symbols and motifs, both recognisable and invented, to create highly personal and meaningful works which explore her inner world. Her recent body of work centers around the imagined childhood Greek village of her much loved Nana Chrisula.

Since graduating from UNSW College of Fine Arts in 1998, she has exhibited in artist run and commercial spaces in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley. After taking time away from her practice to work in education and raise her family, she returned to full time painting in 2022.

Her work is held in private collections in the USA and Canada, as well as in Melbourne, Sydney and the Hunter Valley.