Between the lines by Rachel Dioso-Villa
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.
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.
Before the freak-out about em-dashes in AI-generated text I didn’t even know how to produce one. I’d just copy and paste them as needed. But since the Great Em-dash Emergency, I learned it’s quite easy, so now I use them more, not less. Anyone else own up to this experience? Is it proof we’re bots?
Empty hands
“What do they do,
the singers, tale-writers, dancers, painters, shapers, makers?
They go there with empty hands,
into the gap between.
They come back with things in their hands.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home, page 95.
📷 The Illawarra coast at dusk
#photography
💬 “Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
While reading, I’m acutely aware of certain phrases and sentences that seem particularly significant. Struggling to articulate this significance is the development of taste.
When I read something and think “that’s interesting”, I make a note to record why I find it interesting. This is the way I expose shadowy intuition to the sun.
A death-knell for the Dewey System?
I’m intrigued about the opening of a new library wing at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). It has a world-first, tech enabled cataloguing system, called The O, which means you can just put a book down anywhere and the system will find it for the next reader.
“Phrontisterion is animated by technology that allows us to organise books however we want, while keeping track of everything—and thus does away with the in-many-ways-inadequate Dewey cataloguing system. It’s also a lot bigger than Mona’s old library. Since 2011, the collection has continued to grow and now boasts (literally, David boasts about it quite a lot) some 50,000 items in a range of formats, covering topics such as architecture, science, philosophy, statistics, literature, mathematics, numismatics, ancient Egypt and African art; alongside wine, beer, betting odds, religion, socialism, sex and—that old chestnut—death.”
This latest attempt at innovative library cataloguing put me in mind of art historian Aby Warburg and his library, which was arranged according to what Warburg called ’the law of the good neighbour'.
You can read an interview with David Walsh, the owner and creator of MONA:
I took part in the August '26 IndieWeb Book Club
The book selection for the month was 📚 The Mulai, by Munir Hachemi, and I posted my thoughts online. To sum up, it was a thought-provoking metafiction fiesta.
Now VH Belvadi has posted the roundup, with a review – fittingly, I thought – in the style of the novel itself.
You can take part too. Just read the book, post your thoughts somewhere online and let the organiser know. That’s pretty much it. September’s chosen book is An Unauthorised Fan Treatise, by Wren James. Sara Jaksa chose this title and put out the call for submissions.
I know nothing about this book except that it appears to involve real person fan fiction conspiracy theories… er, maybe. This isn’t exactly my area of expertise so I’m looking forward to being enlightened.
Details of this and other months’ choices are at the IndieWeb Wiki.
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Compliment this with: Jules Verne could have told us AI is not a person
💬 Sadly, not just tech.
📷 Lounge lizard
📚Currently reading: My year in paris with gertrude stein by Deborah Levy.