Ellen Randell Dreams of Wattle was a finalist in the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize 2023, and forms part of the series Luminaries, Women of the Goldfields.

Each spring, when the wattle blooms, I think of Ellen. She was twenty, travelling home from Maryborough with her fiancé, when she paused to gather yellow blossoms from the roadside. It was the last thing she would ever see. Her fiancé, consumed by debt and despair, had planned his own death. In a final, unfathomable act, he stole Ellen’s life too.

History records her as a 19th-century victim of domestic violence, but she was more than that — a young woman in a new land, with her whole life ahead and a love of golden flowers.

Here, she is enveloped by wattle — luminous, reaching, eternal. I have finished the work with 23 karat gold, a glimmering thread back to the Goldfields, where both hope and devastation were unearthed. The blossoms become both memorial and dream, a place where beauty resists violence, and where Ellen’s presence lingers beyond the brutality of her ending. I want her name remembered, carried in light and bloom.

Photographed on Dja Dja Wurrung land

LIMITED EDITION Printed on Canson fine art cotton rag, 310gsm.

Prices are for unframed artwork:

140×105cm, Edition of 6+2AP, $3300

120x90cm, Edition of 6 +2AP, $2300

90x67cm, Edition of 12+2AP, $1300

70×52cm, Edition of 12+2AP, $850