The Winds Were Lovesick With Them, 2024

This work is part of a body of work I have made about Cleopatra, Mark Antony and Julius Caesar. I have been engrossed with this history for a few years and began making paintings about it in 2023. I think of these paintings as ‘history paintings’. In a practical sense, I use the painting’s layers as a way to organise the ‘chapters’ of the story, abstracting the images and thoughts I have about the events, plot, history and movements of the narrative. The earlier events are in the earlier layers so that the past recedes. As I built the work and motifs appeared and developed, I began to see that the work also investigated my own stories. Motifs from the telling of this history had become motifs for the events of my own life. As I worked, I was interrogating why this story had engrossed me and I began to see my own stories reflected in the symbolism and imagery. The painting takes its name, The Winds Were Lovesick With Them, from Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, and the final layer of the painting tells the story of the naval battle at Actium, where myth tells us that Cleopatra deserted the battle, leaving Antony in the lurch. Historians now believe that the plan for Cleopatra to leave was one devised by both Antony and Cleopatra beforehand.

Bianca Vern-Barnett is an artist based in the Hunter Valley, Australia. She is the winner of the 2024 Hunter Emerging Art Prize for painting and will exhibit a new body of work in her first solo show at Straitjacket Artspace, Newcastle, in September 2024. In 2023, her work was selected as a finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize, The Hornsby Art Prize and the Newcastle Club Foundation Painting Prize. She is a graduate of UNSW College of Fine Arts.