It feels worse than it looks

Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize Finalist 2022
30cm x 30cm
Oil on panel

Thoughts swirl around in my head like a colony of blind army ants, lost in a death spiral, parading in my chest. When I’m deep in negative thoughts, this feels accurate. When I’m out, this all feels a bit dramatic.

Ant mills look beautiful—slightly hypnotic—but the ants will walk themselves to death, affixed to the pheromones of those before them, looping back on themselves. It takes an act of environmental variation or a few exhausted workers to break away from the trail for the mill to dissolve. For the lucky ones who manage to extricate themselves, I imagine it’s hard to see how they got caught up in it.