Virtually Here
Stephen Hart
- Sitter: Self Portrait
- Medium: Oil on Board
- Dimensions: 48cm x 59cm
- Representation: FireWorks Gallery
About the artwork
In Virtually Here, Stephen Hart has painted himself without a body, a face adrift in an indeterminate space, untethered from the physical world. Miniature astronaut figures orbit around him, busy as though tending to something important.
The composition emerged from a series of thirty-five daily self-portrait drawings in which the body gradually disappeared, leaving only the head as “a metaphor for the seat of the mind.” “To be virtually here,” Hart writes, “is to be simultaneously visible and unmoored, recognised by others but detached from physical context.”
The astronauts suggest connection and care, yet the floating face remains alone. The work explores the paradox of the digital presence and asks what it means to be seen without being present – whether the image of a person is the same as the person themselves. A portrait for our times, asking what we lose when presence becomes purely digital.
About the artist
Stephen Hart is a Brisbane based sculptor who has called the city home since completing a Master of Arts at QUT in 1994. For over three decades he has produced public sculpture commissions across Brisbane’s neighbourhoods, streetscapes and civic spaces. He is interested in ideas of identity, existence, connection, and the complexities of contemporary life, using material and image to explore the relationships between the personal and the universal.
He has been a finalist in the Wynne Prize and Woollahra Art Prize and held a major survey exhibition at QUT Art Museum.
