I like how Australia puts an emphasis on portraiture as a culturally significant art form — a greater emphasis, certainly than it receives in the UK, where I grew up.

The 2026 Brisbane Portrait Prize has a selection of interestingly diverse entries, showing what’s possible with this form.

An entry that caught my eye was that of criminologist Rachel Dioso-Villa, titled ‘Between the Lines’. It’s a large series of hand-painted notes and images on rice paper. For me this demonstrates how the making of notes can be an art in itself, and how from this repeated practice larger themes gradually arise — in this case, a self portrait.

A display features hanging translucent fabric panels with watercolor portraits and handwritten text in various styles and colors.

Here’s the write-up:

💬 “Between the Lines is not a conventional self-portrait. Across more than 150 suspended sheets of rice paper, Rachel Dioso-Villa has built an image of herself through accumulated illustrations. Each page was made over twelve months, accompanying her through conferences, meetings, travel, her office, studio and home. Handled, written on, painted and reworked over time, every sheet holds traces of her life.
The fragments of text and image that move across the surface were formed while reading case materials and listening to the stories of people wrongfully convicted. This is work Dioso-Villa has been doing for over fifteen years as an Associate Professor of Criminology. Writing appears and disappears, some passages remain; others are buried beneath layers of mark and memory. “The work did not begin as a self-portrait,” she reflects. “It became one.””

You can view the artwork at the artist’s Brisbane Portrait Prize site.

The idea of note-making as art has arisen in several different places, including in the work of Georges Didi-Hubermann, and Daniel Wisser.