Jenny Kee - Waratah Queen

Something extraordinary happens when a body is busy making new life. My hands and feet are bloated in this hot Australian spring and the side effect of carpel tunnel numbness is making my postproduction work a challenge. Yet, I spend hours awake each night possessed by an imagination more vivid than ever, obsessively building new artworks to the most minute detail, and filing them away into a stockpile of to-do's.

Seven months pregnant is about the time most people call it quits and start nesting. I should have a room ready for the arrival of our little girl. Instead, the sewing machine, boxes of costumes and props flow from this room and continue to feed my desperate burning desire to make more and more art, though the body is an unwilling participant!

It's as though I need to squeeze every last drip of creative juice out of my body before our little one becomes the centre of my world...

Recently, with the roaring fires of the Blue Mountains, I felt compelled to spend a day on the hot and smoky mountain, building a set of Australian natives and wildflowers for a portrait of famed Waratah Queen, Jenny Kee. With every leaf and petal in place, it withered in the fiery heat before the next was in place. This sense of hardship is quite at home in the dry bushland of the Blue Mountains and this latest shoot became a challenge that required unremitting perseverance and hope as I muttered... we haven't done a single easy shoot this year!!!