James Morrison Portrait of Timothy Vernon Moore

Artist TV Moore works across genres, including painting, video, sculpture and installation. ‘To me he is the perfect subject. He is a larger-than-life, complex character. I deeply admire his work and like him as a person,’ says James Morrison.

This narrative painting has many stories running through it. ‘I’ve represented Tim as a frog person because of his willingness to make himself vulnerable in his work, but also because frogs are tough and persistent despite their softness. The outsized ghostly woman’s head began as Kate Kelly because of Tim’s video works about her son, Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. But she didn’t work, so gradually the face changed to activist Greta Thunberg or a cross between the two.

‘The snake and the frog have been adversaries forever. The colonial sapling fence separates the European garden from the looming Australian bush, while the orange sun refers to the 2019–20 bushfires. Walking corpses return through cracks in the earth – history is rising up, the dead are applauding Tim.

‘The watermelon with Tim trapped inside, and only his eye peering out, is a note of optimism in this post-apocalyptic world.’