Between The Lines
Rachel Dioso-Villa
- Sitter: Self Portrait
- Medium: Mixed media on rice paper (ink, watercolour, graphite, acrylic), suspended timber framing
- Dimensions: 200cm x 136cm
- Representation: This artist represents themselves
- Categories: Female artist
2026 Metro Arts Experimental Prize
Proudly supported by
Metro Arts
About the artwork
Between the Lines is not a conventional self-portrait. Across more than 150 suspended sheets of rice paper, Rachel Dioso-Villa has built an image of herself through accumulated illustrations. Each page was made over twelve months, accompanying her through conferences, meetings, travel, her office, studio and home. Handled, written on, painted and reworked over time, every sheet holds traces of her life.
The fragments of text and image that move across the surface were formed while reading case materials and listening to the stories of people wrongfully convicted. This is work Dioso-Villa has been doing for over fifteen years as an Associate Professor of Criminology. Writing appears and disappears, some passages remain; others are buried beneath layers of mark and memory. “The work did not begin as a self-portrait,” she reflects. “It became one.”
About the artist
Rachel Dioso-Villa is a Brisbane based visual artist and Associate Professor of Criminology at Griffith University, where she has researched wrongful convictions since 2010 and developed Australia’s first national listing of wrongful conviction cases. Her practice translates legal processes and the emotional weight of research into drawing, painting and installation. She held her first solo exhibition, After, at QCAD Galleries, Brisbane in 2026.
Judges Notes
Rachel Dioso-Villa’s Between the Lines was selected for its textured and ruminatory expansion of what a portrait can be, using suspended sheaves of rice paper, with layers of self-images, and stream-of-consciousness writing to create a portrait that is fragmented, accumulative and lived across time. Moving between the intimate and the institutional, the work gives physical form to the artist’s reflections on identity, unseen labour and the experience of navigating systems of power; inviting us to encounter portraiture not simply as an image of a person, but as a record of the spaces, structures and experiences that shape them.
