Growing up, there was always plenty of love in the house. Things happened, as they do, but underneath it all was a deep sense of being known. We knew each other. We still do. Sometimes you can sit beside someone who has known you your whole life and nothing needs to be said.
Family can be both a source of comfort and complication. In the small, intense world of growing up in the 1980s, identity was shaped through those closest relationships—absorbing more than could be understood at the time, and learning who you were through the people who knew you best.
The work returns to those quiet, unspoken moments: sitting together in comfortable silence, sharing a joke, laughing until you cry. It is a way of revisiting the past and working through what was difficult, while also recognising the profound joy threaded through it. Perhaps that is what family gives us—the ability to sit in silence without needing to fill it, to laugh without needing a reason, and to be known without having to explain yourself.
Harriet Links is a Tasmanian artist based in Clifton Beach. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and has presented four solo exhibitions in Hobart and Melbourne, most recently at the Schoolhouse Gallery, Rosny Farm, Tasmania. Previous solo exhibitions include SOCIAL at Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, and Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne.
Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions and major Australian art prizes, including the National Emerging Art Prize, the Lethbridge Landscape Art Prize, The Next Big Thing Art Prize, and the Henry Jones Art Prize. Her paintings are held in private collections throughout Australia and internationally.
