Tristan Humphries (1962-2000) was an English artist specialising in digital portraiture. He visited Australia in 1998 and worked at RMIT on a series of 'shoe-box' portraits, in which subjects were asked to provide him with personally meaningful items to be incorporated into a multi-layered digital print. These were exhibited at Renard Wardell Gallery in Melbourne in 1999. He returned to England where he died in August 2000. At his memorial one of his close acquaintances said; 'His lifelong passion for portraiture was not a merely aesthetic or formal preference, but was due to the portrait being the distillation of an intense exchange between artist and sitter; at one and the same time both the product and the calling-into-being of two people's acquaintance and knowledge of each other. In his "shoe-box" pictures this reciprocal appraoch to the portrait was fully realised, resulting in genuinely collabotaive works of startling originality, which may properly be termed "conversation" pieces.'
