The Story Beneath the Scars

I did not set out to create a collection.

That realisation came later, when I pulled the paintings out of my studio and placed them together in my living room. I remember standing there looking at them all at once and suddenly seeing something I had not fully understood while I was painting them.

They belonged together.

Each painting had been created separately. I had not painted them with the intention of building a body of work. I had not planned a collection called Scars of a Woman. Some of the pieces were created in soft pastel, some were charcoal and others were textured oil paintings with layers built slowly across the surface. They were not all made in the same way, but when I saw them together, there was a quiet cohesiveness running through them.

It was not only visual. It was emotional.

I could see my wounds in them and I could see my stories. They were not obvious stories, which is part of why the collection feels so powerful to me. People often look at the paintings first and respond to the surface. They see the texture, the figure, the composition and the mood. Then when they hear the story behind the work, something shifts. They begin to understand what they are really looking at.

That moment in my living room was surreal. I felt pride because I had created a body of work without forcing it. I also felt the weight of what the paintings had been holding. There were stories in them that I had not consciously named at the time. Feelings I had not fully identified yet, including shame, fear, uncertainty, pain, discomfort, the body, illness, menopause, marriage, silence and survival.

The paintings had spoken before I had the language.

The first painting that gave the collection its name was Scars of a Woman. It began with a material I had carried with me for years without knowing why.

After I had a 14 centimetre tumour removed from my kidney, I had scans every year for ten years. During those appointments, I was given disposable medical robes to wear. There was something about them I did not like. They felt too close to the vulnerability of that time, too connected to the body being examined, exposed and watched. I was not an artist then, but for some reason I kept some of those robes. I put them in my bag, took them home and stored them in a box.

Years later, while I was in my studio looking for something to create a different kind of texture, I found that box.

The moment I saw the robes again, something clicked.

I tore them, mixed them with texture paste and began working them into the surface of the painting. As I did, I realised that my scar was not only being represented in the work. It was physically in the painting. The material that had been part of my medical experience had become part of the surface.

It felt accidental, but it also felt meant to be.

That first Scars of a Woman painting carried my own kidney cancer scar, but it also began to hold the scars of other women. Breast cancer scars, hysterectomy scars, caesarean scars, liposuction scars and surgical scars. The marks that remain after the body has been opened, repaired, changed or asked to survive something terrifying.

My own scar carries a very specific memory.

I was 44 when I was diagnosed. At the time, I was running a national women’s business events company, coaching women across the country and preparing for a major event in Perth. On the day that event was taking place, I was in hospital being told I had cancer. I could not attend the event. Someone else had to run it for me. That night, I had to tell my family over the phone. My children were teenagers at the time.

Three weeks later, I had a radical nephrectomy. I had a 50 percent chance of survival. On the morning of the surgery, I was at the lawyers making sure my legal documents were in order. I had written letters to the people I loved in case I did not survive.

That is what my scar carries.

It is not just a mark on my body. It is a moment in time. It is the fear of not knowing whether you will come home. It is the memory of being a mother with teenage children and having to face the possibility that your life may not continue in the way you imagined. It is also the beginning of a different trajectory that eventually led me to art.

When I look at that painting now, I see more than my own story. I see the stories women carry in their bodies. The visible scars and the invisible ones. The scars from illness, surgery, grief, shame, loss, silence, childbirth, ageing and all the moments that leave their mark.

Not every painting in the collection includes the disposable medical robes, but the ones that do carry that material with intention. They hold something physical from a time in my life when my body was vulnerable and my future was uncertain.

The rest of the collection began to reveal itself around that first work.

One painting spoke to the feeling of not being seen. Another held the discomfort of shame. Another explored menopause. Another looked at the way women’s bodies are often viewed, judged or sexualised before they are understood. These meanings were not always clear to me while I was painting. Often, I only understood them afterwards.

It was as though the paintings were telling me what I had been feeling.

That is one of the things I have come to understand about my work. The story does not always arrive first. Sometimes the painting arrives first and the truth reveals itself later.

Most of the collection is monochromatic. The works sit in greyscale with only subtle hints of colour underneath. There is a subdued quietness to them. They do not shout. They ask you to come closer. They hold the tension between beauty and pain, softness and strength, exposure and protection.

Then there is Lulu.

Lulu is the final painting in the collection and she is different. She is bright teal. She is alive with colour. She is me naked, with the scars in the texture behind me and around me. She is not hiding from them. She is wrapped in them.

After all the greyscale, Lulu feels like a revelation.

She represents the next phase of my life. She is the celebration of a new body, a body that has changed, survived and carried me through more than I could have imagined. I had lost 30 kilos by then and I was beginning to see myself differently. Not as someone trying to erase what had happened, but as someone willing to stand in her body, scars and all.

That is why Scars of a Woman does not end in pain.

It moves through pain. It moves through shame, fear, silence, illness and uncertainty. It moves through the darker parts of being a woman in a body that has lived. But it ends with reclamation.

It ends with me saying, this is my body now. This is my story. This is what I have carried and this is what I have become.

The collection has since been exhibited at Wheat Wine and Whiskey in Collingwood and at Saga Gallery, where viewers were invited to sit with the deeper meaning behind each work. For me, that matters. These paintings were never created to be decorative. They are beautiful, but they are not only beautiful. They hold lived experience.

When someone collects one of these works, they are not just buying an image. They are choosing to live with a story. They are choosing a piece that carries truth, tenderness, strength and the quiet power of survival.

And when someone asks about the painting on their wall, there is something real to tell.

That is what I want my art to do.

I want it to open a conversation. I want it to hold meaning in a room. I want it to remind us that the body remembers, the heart remembers and sometimes the stories we have carried in silence are the very stories that need to be seen.