Josephine
Emily Stainer
- Sitter: Josephine Rodger
- Medium: Oil on Canvas
- Dimensions: 83cm x 109cm
- Representation: This artist represents themselves
- Categories: Female artist
About the artwork
Josephine Rodger is Emily Stainer’s daughter, posed for a traditional portrait, small and composed, in a setting that is anything but. Wild Australian creatures press in around her, a jungle born from the collision of two worlds.
Stainer was raised in South Africa and built her practice across the United Kingdom before making a new home in Brisbane, carrying with her a collection of fragmented images from museum interiors to extraordinary creatures.
Into this disjointed world she placed her daughter. The work lives in the space between everyday life and a child’s imagination, between the familiar and the newly learnt, a portrait of dislocation and discovery. “By placing Josephine in a Rousseau-like setting, occupied by the animals and birds she has seen since coming to Australia, I have juxtaposed artifice and reality.”
About the artist
Born in South Africa and based in Brisbane, Emily Stainer works across painting, sculpture, installation and automata-making, building self-operating mechanical sculptures or toys that tell a story through movement. Holding a Master of Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand and a Master of History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, her portraits have been selected for the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award.
