Wendy Sharpe Self-portrait with ghosts

There is a line of psychics in Wendy Sharpe’s family. ‘My grandmother Bessie and great-aunt Ann were psychic, as was my great-great-grandmother in Ukraine (then Russia),’ says the Sydney artist.

‘Aunt Ann was quite a famous psychic and gave large public readings and performances in the UK and Australia, while Bessie could apparently see ghosts and receive messages from the spirit world. As a result, my father believed in ghosts. When he was a young man, he worked as a journalist for the Psychic News in London.’

Sharpe reflects on her family’s mystical legacy in this self-portrait, which she has presented in a found antique frame. She also references Victorian ‘ghost photography’, which saw people sitting formally in a studio with wispy, semitransparent figures superimposed over them. ‘To the modern viewer, this is clearly achieved using a double exposure, but few realised that in the early days of photography,’ says Sharpe.

‘Most of my work is about the juxtaposition of the real and the imagined, the seen and the unseen,’ says Sharpe, who won the 1996 Archibald with another self-portrait. She is also a finalist in this year’s Sulman Prize.