Describing a living story

- extract from the catalogue 'Descript'

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"Through painterly images, Fyfe seeks to elicit a feeling of connection in her audience and convey a message, story, and emotion. Fyfe paints on unconventional substrates as an exploration of texture and colour and, more profoundly, as a response to obsolescence in our aspirational society. The Descript  project was born from books rescued from a rainy day on a nature strip, imagining the souls who had thumbed pages and engaged with these stories on their own human journey. The portraits which ensued, created over 5 years, are underpinned by a collection of vintage objects passed on, or found in hard waste, op shops, and second-hand book shops.

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A representational painter, Fyfe works in oils in front of her subject in a time frame of 3.5 hours, in a technique known as alla prima (at once). Vital to her own portrait work, alla prima provides an in-the-moment experience which holds in its embrace the atmosphere, the cultural environment, the artist and the sitter, and produces an historical record of an event in time.​Throughout Fyfe’s current works, found objects are chosen for their interesting content and for their appearance. Fyfe is continually challenged by the paint’s behaviour on the surface and the often vibrant colour of the substrate but, most of all, by her time limit. 

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Descript is also a reimagining of the 15th and 16th Century Renaissance art experience. A renaissance painting might, at first glance, be a lifelike rendering of a subject yet, on further inspection, yield a message using motifs and symbols. Paying tribute to these traditional oil paintings, Descript  presents a resemblance to organic biology, enabling an innate connection with the viewer, however the art can also be ‘read’ by the viewer. The Descript  paintings communicate our environmental burden through their recycled origins and, through printed and encoded stories, their social message of connection.

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Recently, Fyfe has been reaching back into her family history - her connection to Britain and also to the Limestone Plains around Canberra, home of her maternal Ngunnawal ancestor. Fyfe feels that she is a combination of cultures. A mixture which, indeed reflective of contemporary Australia, is also present in her artwork. Fyfe allows her lineal ties to inspire a curiosity and sensitivity to country and, on occasion, influence her selection of books and portraits.

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In February 2020, Fyfe was introduced to an exhibition visitor who used a wheelchair and learned that his view of the paintings was distorted because of his restricted height. Viewing further from the wall improved this but made detail impossible to see. This chance meeting has influenced Fyfe’s work immeasurably. Hence, thinking about accessibility in all forms, the Descript works are presented in ‘frames’ on the wall as a traditional painting but they are also able to be removed from their shelf and touched, which acknowledges their origin and enables engagement by all exhibition visitors.

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Descript is an invitation to a contemporary audience to engage not only visually but also emotionally with the art of portraiture and the stories it conveys.​​​​"