Artists statement

‘Self portrait at home’

This artwork was conceived after a series of paintings depicting the interior of my home in Ballarat. Those paintings began as glimpses around the house, mostly captured at night, of hallways, darkened corners, and ominous entrances into bedrooms.

Later on I began to fill these spaces with a figure, that of my girlfriend (now wife), and conducted portraits of her placed amongst the shadows in a deliberate attempt to conjure up associations of Baroque painting as well as still images from horror films. I wanted to see what was sinister in this house, to imagine it, as well as observing it directly.

‘Self portrait at home’ is an attempt at summarising the combination of imagination and observation, of wandering through interior spaces as well as being absorbed in it: that what we see is then also taken into our consciousness, or in the case of this painting what we see is about to be swallowed.

This concept of combining what is observed with what is imagined and using references to the physical body as a kind of mediator of this process is expressed in Kenneth Slessor’s poem ‘South Country’, a poem that partly inspired my approach to this painting. The following verses provide an example:

And over the flat earth of empty farms

The monstrous continent of air floats back

Coloured with rotting sunlight and the black,

Bruised flesh of thunderstorms:

Air arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge,

Ditches and hutches, with a drench of light,

So huge, from such infinities of height,

You walk on the sky’s beach

‘Self portrait at home’ may not express itself as seriously as Slessor’s poem does but I hope it shows the impact as well as the texture and flavour that houses of the Ballarat landscape, and those of the imagination, can have.

Duncan Lannan

Historical information

Duncan LANNAN (1972- )

Duncan Lannan undertook a Diploma of Arts (Visual Arts) at RMIT between 1995 and 1996. A further two years study at the University of Ballarat (now Federation University Australia) saw Duncan Lannan awarded a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts) in 2000. He completed a Graduate Diploma of Education at the University of Melbourne in 2001.

Duncan Lannan's exhibition 'Young, Dumb and Full of Ambition!' was held at the Art Gallery of Ballarat from 13 July to 11 September 2014.

Physical description

Self portrait of the artist with mouth open, and a house on the tongue.

This piece was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ballarat in 2007 in the "Eye to I" exhibition which was curated by former Federation University Art theory lecturer Geoff Wallis. The exhibition was a survey of self portraits by Australian contemporary artists.

Gift of Geoff and Nola Wallis, 2017