Originally published in Esperanto Magazine, The Candid Edition, Issue 1, 2026 (print). Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Melbourne-based photographer Abigail Varney for the first 2026 edition of Esperanto, Monash University’s student arts and culture magazine. The issue, themed Candid, explored ideas surrounding authenticity, observation, and what it means to capture people honestly — concepts that immediately made me think of Varney’s photographic practice. Just b

For World Poetry Day, I wanted to share a piece that sits at the edge of language — where writing begins to fail slightly, and the body takes over. The poem below began with a question that felt difficult to articulate directly:what happens to the body when something is seen that cannot be un-seen? We often think of vision as passive — as something that simply receives the world. But this poem resists that idea. It understands seeing as an event. Something that enters, alters

I made this painting recently, and while looking at it again I realised how bodily it felt — almost womb-like. Womanhood in colour and movement. Perhaps the body sometimes knows before the mind does. Art that comes from the body often reaches back into it. That’s not weakness — that’s where its power is. This painting began as a physical act. I covered a previous canvas with white acrylic, a painting I had been stuck on and unhappy with for months. Over that blank surface I b

This interview began as a commissioned catalogue text for CAVES Gallery at Melbourne Art Fair 2026. The version published here extends beyond those initial parameters, shaped by a studio visit, a sustained conversation with the artist, and photographs I took within her workspace. When I first spoke with Mira about her new works, she returned to the figure of Demeter — the mythic mother who moves between anguish and recognition, sensing her daughter’s passage between worlds. T