Virtual collection tour

ROBERT BUNZLI: Hello and welcome to the National Portrait Gallery here in Canberra, the national capital. My name is Robert. I work in the Access and Learning Team here at the National Portrait Gallery. A quick audio description of me. I am a Caucasian man in his 50s with greying short hair ‑ some would say grey ‑ and a grey and black short beard and I'm wearing a mauve shirt with a grey jacket. It all sounds a bit drab, doesn't it, but I think I look a bit dapper. In the background I have the entrance to the National Portrait Gallery, with its concrete and wood architecture and an orange sculpture that looks a bit like a germ!

A little bit of housekeeping as we get underway. Today's tour, Disability in the Frame Part 2 ‑ Part 1 was last year ‑ is an hour long, not the usual 30 minutes for our tours that we have on our Tuesdays. It is being captioned, and if you want to access the captions, you need to follow the Google Chrome link that is on the National Portrait Gallery website and that is the way to access the captions. Tyson is interpreting for us on screen and thank you very much for doing that.

A webinar, not a meeting today, so the format is a little bit different, so you won't be able to see each other on the screen, unfortunately, because we need to keep control of the screen so that we can keep the Auslan on screen at all times. But do feel free to pop things in the chat that we can respond to ‑ observations or questions. We welcome them greatly. In our session today, because this is a special session with a lot of access issues, we are going to be keeping our portraits up on the screen a lot longer than in our usual Tuesday sessions so that we can have a full audio description of these images. So there are a few things different this week but we're quite excited to be providing this fully accessed program. Alright, without any more ado, I'm going to pass you on to Annette, who is going to take our session today.

ANNETTE TWYMAN: Hi! Hello! Yuma! Welcome to this highlight tour. My name is Annette. I perhaps just will describe myself a little bit. I identify as she/her. I am in my early 60s. I have short, grey hair. I'm white. I wear blue‑rimmed glasses and quite fancy drop coloured earrings. I'm wearing a white shirt and I'm also wearing my National Portrait Gallery badge, which is a red rectangle.

It's just so lovely to be with you here today. We are really thrilled to be able to have a full hour as opposed to our half hour. I would like to acknowledge the land where we are here today in Canberra, which is the Ngunnawal and the Ngambri people, and I was just speaking to Tyson, our audio describer ‑ Auslan interpreter earlier, and we were thinking we need to find out what the Auslan word for "Ngunnawal" and "Ngambri" is so that we don't have to fingerspell it. So we'll get on to that.

So the last time we thought about disability, we were thinking about it in relation to this collection, which, of course, is the Australian National Portrait Gallery, whose intention is to represent Australia, to represent the great diversity of talent, skills, achievements, people basically across Australia through time who have had such a huge impact, and we do that by documenting portraits of them. We buy them. We scour galleries, other auction houses for them. We also commission them. We commission portraits every year. We have been reflecting for a while about how representative our collection as it is right now is ‑ how representative it is of people with disability and disabled artists. So the very first conversation we had was in the gallery and we were looking at some works that were actually at that point on display.

Today what I wanted to do was to actually look at some of the portraits which are not on display and which have not been on display for a little while, and they're by artists who identify with disability. Of course, as many of you will know, there is a lot of politics around disability and the emergence of our recognition of the rights of people with disability and, of course, that clearly connects with the way that we document Australians. So we're on a journey here at the Portrait Gallery where we want to move to a place where we don't have to think always about categories of people. We think much more about that individual and we think about the ways that we intercept, that we are not defined by any one particular aspect of our life or our personality. We're so much richer and more interesting than that.

So I'm going to share with you today, to start with, a remarkable woman. Her name is Theresa Byrnes. We might just go straight to the portrait that we have of her. She is an artist, but this is a photograph of her, a portrait photograph, made by Greg Weight in 1999. So I might just go into ‑ you will have this image. Hopefully you can ‑ if you have low vision, you can access as much of this image as possible on your computer screen. I'm going to go ahead and do an audio description of this image. So the portrait is a black and white photograph of Theresa Byrnes made by Greg Weight in 1999. The photograph is gelatin silver on paper, measuring about 45cm tall by 35cm wide. It is displayed normally surrounded by a white mounting and a plain wooden frame. Theresa sits in a wheelchair to the right of the centre of the photograph. There is an interior wall close behind her and the floor is made of timber boards. Her gaze is direct. She looks back at the camera lens focused on her. Everything in the space, including her hands, arms, clothes, wheelchair, the wall close behind her and the floor are splattered with paint. The wall extends across the entire space behind her. It is a black, flat surface but coated in these layers of paints, applied with huge brush strokes, drips and sprays, so that only random areas of the under‑black paint show through. A thin, white streak of paint runs down the full length of the centre of the wall, quietly dividing the space. In the lower foreground, Theresa is seated in a wheelchair which is positioned diagonally, pointing out of the space to our right. The chair has a back rest but no arms. The large black wheel visible at its turned angle contrasts with the much smaller, more manoeuvrable front wheel. Theresa's face is touched by light on her left, her right side shaded. She has dark, shoulder‑length hair which is parted at the side and sweeps over her forehead and down her face, one lock curling in and following the line of her right cheekbone. The rest flickers out at the ends at the base of her neck. She has a smooth, wide forehead, striking straight dark brows and eyes, high cheekbones, closed lips and a straight and unsmiling expression. A short necklace encircles her neck with a small, round, gleaming pendant resting against her defined collarbone. Her slender torso twists front‑on and she leans on her right arm, bent at a right angle behind her, with her fingers wrapped around the wheel of the chair. Her left arm grabs her shin. Her foot is propped on her right thigh. She wears heavily painted black paint‑splattered jeans and heavy‑duty laced work boots. Her right foot rests on the foot plate of the wheelchair. Narrow tyre tracks crisscross the floor and several paintbrushes are scattered to her right and behind her.

So I hope that was helpful. I think we all find that listening to an audio description can really focus our looking at an image. You might see things slightly differently. That's absolutely how it is, but it also might draw our attention to some aspects of an image. So Theresa Byrnes, wow, she is a force of nature and she is an Australian who moved to New York quite early on in her art practice and her obsession, as she calls it, is abstraction. She is very much part of the kind of Jackson Pollock approach to physical, energised relationship with paint, and that, for her, can be both in terms of working on a large surface ‑ a wall, a canvas, the floor ‑ but it's also very much her performance art, which sometimes includes her painting her body and rolling and creating line and shape with her body as, in effect, the brush. So she's intensely physical. This is kind of remarkable because since she was 17, she was diagnosed with a very rare degenerative disease called Friedreich's ataxia ‑ I have to pronounce it correctly ‑ which means it is a degenerative disease and she talks about there is no obstacle for her and she says ‑ this is a quote from her ‑ "not men, not money, not disability, nothing will stop me; I'm getting to the fricking studio and I'm making that painting", and that's exactly what she has done. Her energy is ‑ really, I spent some time looking at YouTube interviews with her and looking at some of her performances, quite recent performances, in New York where she lives, and she is a power. She never backs away from what are the limitations ‑ increasing limitations of her body, but she uses her body to its fullest extent in this passionate connection, conversation, with her art practice. She's really one for us to own as an Australian who is, as I say, working overseas. So I hope this has acted as a kind of cue for you to follow Theresa Byrnes' work.

We're going to look at something completely different now. This is a work in our collection which you may well have actually seen with us before. It's a different work. If we're going from the wild and expressive paint‑splattered walls of Theresa Byrnes' studio, we're actually going to the angelic voice of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. This is a portrait which has just monumental impact, not just for scale but for the fact that Gurrumul is depicted here as a very large‑scale head. I'm actually ‑ we're just putting up on the screen me standing next to that image. So this is a portrait of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu by Guy Maestri made in 2009. I'll just give you a shorter but hopefully helpful audio description of this portrait.

This portrait of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was painted by Guy Maestri in 2009 with oil on linen. The artist used only black paint, building it up in thin layers to create areas of white, from shades of pale grey through to rich black. Gurrumul's face is front‑on, so close up. The tip of his nose is cropped off. It occupies most of the image, with a minimal grey background. Light touches the left of his face. His hair is short and dark. On his left, it ascends to a fine line of sideburn that runs down towards his full cheekbone and jaw. His shapely left ear curves behind it. Beneath his heavy brow, Gurrumul's eyes are dark, veiled in shadow. His nostrils are rounded. His upper lip slender, with soft light reflecting off a prominent lower lip. His neck is swathed in several layers of collar.

And I wanted to include this portrait today because it really speaks to an act of trust between an individual and an artist because Gurrumul, who was blind from very early on in his life, had to trust the artist, Guy Maestri, in the way that he depicted him. And it's very important to state that Guy Maestri shared this image and described it to Gurrumul and Gurrumul's family for their affirmation. It was essential that they were comfortable with this portrait. Guy Maestri was on a kind of quest because he had heard about Gurrumul's extraordinary musicianship. He went to a concert, heard him, and felt, as many artists do, that he had to track down this individual because he needed to make a portrait of him, and that was tricky because Gurrumul was a very busy and quite reserved individual and Guy Maestri had I think less than an hour with him in Sydney Airport before Gurrumul flew off to the tour in the States. But from that meeting and from the drawings and the photograph made, he then ‑ the artist, Guy Maestri, immersed himself in his studio to the sound of Gurrumul's voice singing in language. I think this is arguably ‑ but I think many people would probably agree ‑ an example of an interconnection between two individuals, which is about a kind of trust in terms of depiction, a sharing of self through somebody else's eyes. It's a powerful portrait, strongly evocative of a life we have lost, but a resounding and resonant voice.

So we're going to move on to a couple now. I hope you're still with us. Please write in the chat box any comment that you have or question. Anything that I'm going too fast with, please just let us know and we'll slow down and we'll catch up. This is also an important portrait in our collection. It's a portrait of Judith Wright and Barbara Blackman, painted around 1956 by Charles Blackman, Barbara Blackman's husband. And if the trust between the artist and the subject is important, what this is depicting is the intimacy between two dear friends, lifelong friends really, and you may be aware that Judith Wright, the great poet, environmentalist who really had such a powerful imprint not just on her activism but also in so many ways that we think about our land, about Australia, her long relationship, her friendship with Barbara Blackman, who was blind from when she was in her early teen years. So I will just read you the audio description of this fine portrait of the two of them.

The portrait shows Judith Wright, poet, literary critic, editor and fiction writer, with her friend Barbara Blackman, poet, writer and philanthropist. The portrait was painted by Barbara's husband, Charles Blackman, with oil on paper laid down on board. The portrait is orientated horizontally and measures about 115cm tall by 150cm wide with its frame. The colours are painted to resemble different metals. The band of the frame closest to the painting is very thin and gleams pink like polished copper. The next band is wider and made to look like antique gold leaf that has darkened and rubbed off in patches. The background of the portrait is sky blue. In the foreground, Judith and Barbara are shown up close. Their heads and torsos take up most of the work. The women's faces are in profile. The friends are connected by their gaze as they look into each other's eyes. Their arms, which reach across, and their upper bodies that seem to merge. The style of the figures and the painting technique are distinctive and not life‑like. Judith and Barbara's silhouetted profiles are simplified and exaggerated in an almost cartoon‑like way. This simplicity and the defined line between their forms and the blue background gives the women the quality of paper cut‑outs that have been collaged on. A limited colour palette of blue, red, yellow, white and black has been used and either mixed on the paper to create green, purple, lighter and darker shade, or layered in thin washes. The paint itself has been applied unevenly, with some thick streaks of colour, some areas washed with diluted pigment and other patches of brown paper ground left bare. Judith Wright is on the left of the portrait and is the slightly shorter figure. Her head is in profile, her face turned towards her friend on the right. She has a short, red fringe and the rest of her hair in blue, green and red falls straight down, ending bluntly in line with her chin. The brush strokes are irregularly vertical dashes, except at the ends of her hair, which are painted in round dabs. Judith's ear, back of head and hair are protectively covered by the splayed fingers of Barbara's right hand. The silhouette of Judith's face is simplified and geometric, almost like a tall rectangle with a triangle nose jutting out. Details such as an eyebrow or a nostril are omitted. Her eye, which slants down at the outer edge, is painted with a red outline and smudges of blue on the eyelids and iris. Judith's cheek is a pink blur and the rest of her skin is a warm beige of the paper, with some patches of translucent white. Judith's lips have a purple‑grey hue and turn down, following the same angle as her eye. Judith's torso faces forward. She's wearing a V‑neck sleeveless garment in blue‑grey. The brush strokes roughly repeat the shape of the garment. Judith's bare right shoulder is visible, while her left arm is invisible behind her friend. Are we good? In the centre of the portrait is a negative space between the two figures. The face is enclosed in three points ‑ the top where Judith's forehead and Barbara's hit brim seem to merge mid‑way down, where Barbara's arm extends out and across her friend and at the bottom. The negative space is emphasised by dark shading around the women's profiles which becomes gradually lighter towards the centre space. Barbara wears a straw hat worn by school girls like a low crown with a wide brim that casts a band of shadow over her brow. Beneath the hat, the hair falls straight and flicks out slightly, in line with the bottom line. It is filled in with soft vertical smudges of pale blue, red and yellow.

I think we'll finish that there. It's a beautiful portrait for all, as you would have heard, the glimmer and shimmer of colours that aren't necessarily where you would expect to find them ‑ in their face, their flesh and in their hair. And Charles Blackman was really part of that relationship, not just because he was married to Barbara but because he wrote and read the letters that Judith and Barbara wrote to one another for decades. They didn't always live in the same part of Australia and so Judith was a great letter‑writer and she would write to Barbara, and Charles would read the letters and then Barbara would dictate to him and mail back a letter to her friend, Judith. And those letters have been published and they are a wonderful commentary on a moment in our history ‑ really the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s ‑ of the lives of two women, sometimes the very ordinary lives of wives, mothers, food, not having enough housekeeping, but also much bigger issues to do with where they feel their place is in Australia and their shared passion for the environment, for Indigenous issues, for art in all its forms.

So we're going to a very different image now. This is going to blast you out of your seat, I think. From the really serene and beautiful world of Gurrumul Yunupingu and Barbara Blackman and Judith Wright, we're going to look at the extraordinary man that is Mike Parr. And you may have heard of Mike Parr. He's often a controversial figure in Australian art because he is a pioneer of the very physical and sometimes for many people very shocking art form of performance, but he has extraordinary versatility as a painter, a printer, a performance artist, making films. He is a public speaker. He is irrepressible. We're looking at a portrait of him by a very fine portrait maker, Greg Weight. We have a significant number from him. This one I will audio describe to you.

The image is black and white. Mike Parr occupies the immediate foreground in a shallow space. He is seated and his knees are folded back. Next to him on his right there is a low, small black wooden box‑like table. The image is cropped at his knees and just below the surface of the box. Immediately behind him, the white wall is partially covered by a large sheet of clean, white paper, attached by push pins at the bottom corners. It extends length‑ways, almost to the edge of the image, but does not cover the lower half ‑ the lower section of the wall, which is splattered with drips of paint. An indistinct blurred shadow of Parr's seated figure travels down the wall, crossing the paper and the exposed wall. Mike Parr's body faces forward, his square‑shaped head leaning and turning slightly towards his right shoulder. His short, thick, dark and grey hair is neatly cut above his ear. His high forehead is furrowed with two raised blood vessels, highlighted as they travel down towards and meet the bridge of his nose. His features are compressed into a grimace. His eyes are tightly closed, nose crinkled and wide. His mouth is open with clenched teeth. Parr wears a black t‑shirt with elbow‑length sleeves, a black belt and black trousers, which is stark against the white wall behind him. His right arm extends out so that the lower side of his palm touches the naked frame of a lit candle on the box table next to him. The simple white candle is wedged in a clump of sloughed clay, a small matchbox alongside it. Parr's left t‑shirt sleeve finishes without an arm.

So Mike Parr ‑ if you have been to one of his performances, you will never forget it because he attempts to challenge every part of you. He is one of the most honest and brave artists in Australia today. He talks about his own life experience and that was that he was born with a disability, which has been a reference point for his work about anxiety and body. He was born with an arm which doctors felt immediately they had to somehow correct and he had surgery on his arm and was separated from his mother for his first three weeks of his life. That involved the amputation of a large part of his arm from above his elbow. So he talks about ‑ I'll give you a quote from him: "I became convinced that the basic cause was my disability. It was as though my disability was associated with castration. The self‑aggression, behaviour, was a case of confronting a primitive fear of mutilation by giving in to it. It was as if I re‑enacted the traumatic memory of my disability".

So much of his performance, as is shown in this photograph that Greg Weight has taken of him in his studio, is looking at the endurance of pain. His hand is held over the naked flame, and, in fact, he made a performance film which was: how long can you hold your hand over the flame? He has shocked and confused visitors to cultural institutions where he's done performances that he has hacked off his arm and, of course, it is prosthetic; it is not a real arm. But he does not hold back in forcing us into another way of engaging with him and his art.

I think that, unlike Theresa Byrnes, who also has a disability but has a very different life, a very different art practice, a very different personality, he is another wonderful example for us about the diversity of life experience and the way, as artists, we use that life experience. There is no category that we can put anybody into, nor is the experience of disability. And, of course, we're aware that many people have had to disguise disability, both invisible disability and physical disability, in order to have the opportunities that able‑bodied people take for granted, and that is the case in the arts sector, as well as everywhere else. So both Theresa and Mike Parr really send us such a profound message of: whoever you are, however you want to make art, however you want to engage with it, we are entitled to do that and go for it.

So I would like to show you what is, as far as I am aware, our only self‑portrait by a disabled artist, an artist who identifies as disabled, in our collection, which is Mike Parr's self‑portrait. Here we go. So, as I mentioned, this is, as yet, our only self‑portrait by a disabled artist, but it is pretty phenomenal. It is huge. It is made up of 12 dry point self‑portrait sketches and it covers 12 sheets. I'll give you an audio description of it in a minute, but when it is actually displayed on the wall, as it was a couple of years ago, it really takes up the wall. It commands the space. Of course, it is fractured because it's made of 12 portraits that are hung as one. Again, we can kind of reflect on what Mike Parr might be suggesting here in terms of our multiple layers of interaction, personality, character. There is no one defining image. So we might just go to the large screen. I'll give you the details of this work.

The work 12 Untitled Self‑Portraits was made by Mike Parr in 1990 with the assistance of master printer John Loane. The 12 portraits are arranged in a grid of two rows of six and measure overall about 2m high by 4.5m wide. The drawings are drypoint etchings of black lines on white grounds. Each sheet depicts a different version of Parr's face and upper torso. There is a great diversity in the positioning of the faces, backgrounds, facial expressions, level of detail and the accuracy of likeness in each image. Some of the drawings are closer up than others, such as that on the top far right where the face takes up the entire page space, in contrast with that beneath, where the face and the shoulders are surrounded by space. All of the images have a background of scratchy lines and squiggles. John Loane describes these as spider lines. The two on the top and lower rows appear to include ambiguous objects. The top left portrait is also unlike the others, as it depicts two figures ‑ one in the foreground with long hair. Its body is tilting upwards to the left of the paper, its head lower down, seeming to lay in the lap of the second figure. Both figures have upturned, smiling mouths, whereas the other faces have straight or downturned lips. There is also a variation in the level of detail and likeness in the portraits, such as the second from the left on the lower row, which looks as though it has been drawn with a single line, while the image on the top right uses tonal modelling and reveals the creases and furrows of Parr's skin. All the depictions are expressive. The black lines that describe Parr's appearance appear energetic and lively; in others, agitated and choppy; in others, densely overlapped and velvety black. His image alternates between squeezed, stretched, flattened and modelled, pulled apart and reassembled.

So drypoint print making was suggested to Mike Parr as a medium that he might enjoy and it immediately appealed to him. He actually quotes this idea of pour some etching acid into the palm of your hand. That was an early performance instruction. So that was along with having a branding iron made up with the word "Artist", brand this word on your body. So his self‑portrait project ‑ and he has made over 1,000 self‑portraits ‑ can be seen as many cuts into the mirror of his flesh, so many cuts in the anxious body. The precipice is to be found on the paper. There's just some quotes around description of his work.

Just the process of making a drypoint etching requires extraordinary strength and energy. It's a very physical act, trying to scratch into this copper plate, which is why as we discussed in the audio description, the lines sometimes are deep; sometimes they're feathery, spider‑like, but every one of those marks, those lines, will come through as a really strong impression in the finished print. So he has quoted as saying, "The drypoint finish performance endurance to get done because they're a massive acting out, even to the point of damaging my body". So even creating these self‑portraits, he has sacrificed his body in this way.

As I mentioned before, he is constantly channelling his very early trauma as a child with what he perceived as a form of castration of his soul, the way that his body was mutilated by doctors early in his life. So the copper plates were traumatised too. They were dragged across an concrete floor. The noise on the surface of the plate was intense. It had a disorder. It was random and unstructured and it was a way that John Loane, his collaborator, the master printmaker, found was disruptive. It took him right outside his comfort zone of usual print making, and as Parr says, it's always trying to annihilate the process, repetition and the displacement of the process. So the way that Mike Parr leaves no stone unturned to embed in all his art work this being, this presence, that he feels that he must communicate. I feel like I have just talked quite a bit about each of these portraits and I am really curious to know if there are any comments or questions in the chat box. I would just love at this point to hear what you have to say.

ROBERT BUNZLI: There are a few things in the chat. Oh, yes, this is Robert speaking, by the way. Not on camera, just audio. We have a few things in the chat, but if people would like to put a question or a comment in, please do that now. Kara Linnell has said the way that you speak about it and the way you present the art inspires her to do the same with her collection at the Bunbury Regional Art Gallery, which is a nice compliment, and it would be nice to have a conversation with them at some stage maybe. Sandra says that these are really good descriptions of the works and this way of doing the descriptions should be modelled to everyone, especially students who wish to see visual art objects. Amy has said that thud, she almost fell off her chair, blasted by hearing about Mike Parr and his experiences. That's where we have got at the moment.

ANNETTE TWYMAN: Thank you. Well, that's really lovely to hear. Mike Parr does not disappoint. I recommend you follow him. He also comments not just in terms of his life experience but about political issues of contemporary political issues of note. His partner is Austrian. Her family were subject to the Second World War, to the Holocaust, and he has spent time in Austria and is very, very closely connected to that story. He speaks for people he believed to be marginalised, politically, and he is fierce in his condemnation of political power that he feels is an intrusion or an abuse. He has many things to say.

So you can see me here standing in the gallery. Behind me is again that wonderful portrait of Gurrumul and also on my other side is our fabulous portrait of Marcia Langton. What I was really hoping to do today was to just continue our conversation about art and disability and portraiture because it is a constant and it's one that we are really embracing here at the portrait gallery, as we embrace all Australians' experience of life. I think, as I mentioned in our first highlight tour, we are very conscious of the fact that all our portraits are of people who ‑ visitors say to us, "Oh, they're so inspiring, and what extraordinary lives; oh, I could never have done that" or whatever, and we just have to be watchful of what the wonderful late Stella young talked about, which was a form of disability pornography, so that we don't reduce our portraits of disabled people or indeed our artists who identify with a disability ‑ we don't reduce them into purely that defining category. We have these massive intersections in our lives and what we know is that we are missing out on this rich wealth of talent that we have in Australia and we would really love to engage and encompass that in our collection in the way that we interpret here at the portrait gallery. So I think we have just about got to the end of our time.

ROBERT BUNZLI: Just before we finish up, I will just say that there was a question from Adam, saying he would be interested in some information about how we develop our audio descriptions, but we may not have time to go into that in great detail. But maybe just a very quick address.

ANNETTE TWYMAN: Thank you for that. Yes, just briefly, our audio descriptions are works in progress, and if you would like to make any comment about the audio description today, we would warmly welcome that. We are very fortunate that, as a team, we had an immersive training with Access2Arts, based in Adelaide, so we care very deeply about our audio descriptions and we spent quite a lot of time, and I would like to reach out and thank my colleagues who helped me prepare my audio descriptions for today. But we are learning and we are really enjoying our programs with Vision Australia, where we have a lot of participation and we are looking at artworks in the galleries. So we would like to do this more, and, as I say, we warmly welcome any feedback from you.

ROBERT BUNZLI: That is really good, Annette. It is Robert here again, not on screen, just by audio. Angus has asked whether you think there is a connection between the artists' disabilities and mental health struggles that they incorporate into their artworks.

ANNETTE TWYMAN: I would suspect, yes, just like the rest of us. I think we all connect in our life with our mental health every moment of every day, so to a greater and lesser extent for certain individuals, but, yes, where a disability has negatively impacted somebody's life, that is going to be a powerful voice in their work.

ROBERT BUNZLI: And Jane has put in a comment about how we have discussions, open discussions, with artists with disabilities and how the portrait gallery develops policy and whether ‑ I know we have links into the community and we do get advice. I wonder if you could expand on that.

ANNETTE TWYMAN: Absolutely. That's core business for us. We are very fortunate here to have a wonderful Access and Inclusion Advisory Group, which is made up of artists, disabled artists in the community, but we're not limited to that. So please get in touch with us if you feel that you would like to be part of some kind of initiative. Definitely, this is something we would like to pursue. So I think Robert is nodding at me, which sort of tells me that ‑‑

ROBERT BUNZLI: We've got time but we are through our content.

ANNETTE TWYMAN: So "fearless" ‑ I think that's probably one of the words that comes from today. Fearless and proud and live your life. That's what Mike Parr and Theresa Byrnes seem to be saying to us. Whether we love their work or agree with their sentiments, they are absolutely part of this culture of Australia. So we would just love to continue these conversations, as I said. Please give us feedback. Send us emails. Any form of communication would be really welcomed by us. So thank you, and I hope you have a wonderful day.

ROBERT BUNZLI: Thank you very much, Annette. There were a few portraits there that I was not familiar with, so I found it very interesting also. Coming up on Friday, we have an interview in our galleries with artist Greg Weight, photographer, who has a career spanning 50 years. We have over 100 of his portraits in our collection. So we're going to have a conversation with him and get some of his insights into his practice and the portraits that we have of his, and next Tuesday we're back to our usual virtual highlights tours for 30 minutes from 12.30 to 1pm eastern daylight time, and it's quite an intriguing one coming next Tuesday. Carolyn will be talking to us about a little bundle of piffle. So if you want to know what that means, you'll have to tune in next Tuesday. We are working on having some captions for our more general virtual events and we will have some news on that in the near future. We are trying to ensure that more of our digital content is fully accessible. So thank you very much for joining us. And I hope to see you virtually again soon. Goodbye. I forgot to say thank you very much to Tyson, who Zoomed in from Japan. And has done a wonderful job over the hour. And also to our captioner, Nari. Excellent work. Thank you, everyone. Bye bye.