Simone Griffin Pilgrim

‘My mum has always enjoyed telling me the story of when she saw Halley’s comet in 1986, while lying on the grass in the undulating landscape of the escarpment early one evening,’ says Simone Griffin, a first-time finalist in the Wynne Prize. ‘I have always wished I might live long enough to see it myself.’

Griffin has painted a view of Nganyaywana Country from Gumbaynggirr Country, that is, looking up and west to the Dorrigo Escarpment from the base of the mountain at Thora, NSW. In what Griffin terms ‘an intergenerational conduit’, she has included Halley’s comet, which can be seen travelling between sky and Country, moving through vapour-thin layers of paint, and time and space.

Griffin has titled her work as an ode to Halley’s comet but also to her family. It is part of a body of work by Griffin that explores the intersection of Aboriginal and Western stories, which transcend multiple cultures and belief systems – ‘as above, so below’.