Background
I was born on Dharug Country (Western Sydney) in New South Wales, Australia, and raised and worked on family market gardens there between the 1960’s and 1980s. My parents Giovanni and Veneranda Mifsud, survived the catastrophic bombing of Malta during WWII when it was the most heavily shelled country on the planet for its size. My parents and two toddler brothers spent six weeks at sea on a cramped rusty ship with many sick migrants. Mum was seven months pregnant at the time. The young family arrived in Sydney in May 1954 and were sponsored and housed by other Maltese immigrants until they found a place of their own. At the age four, I discovered a box of black and white family photographs that Mum had brought with her from Malta. It contained portraits of my parents in an utterly foreign landscape. Those younger faces of my parents seemed both familiar and foreign. The box also contained photographs of my grandparents and a large extended Maltese family I had never seen. The photographs enthralled me because they had suddenly opened a window onto a world bigger than I had known. They were the first photographs I had ever held in my hand. Their value and power, led me to take up photography at the age of ten using a Kodak 110 Instamatic camera Mum gave me. I became hooked, taking pictures of family, market gardens, pets and the local landscape. The exchange of letters and photographs was for migrants an umbilicus connecting them to their distant homeland and families. Mum regularly photographed her growing family (using a Kodak Box Brownie) and sent the photographs to her parents back home carefully folded into her beautifully handwritten letters. In return, Mum would receive much anticipated letters containing more treasured photographs from Malta. I studied, lived and worked in Sydney from 1981 until 1995. From 1985 to 2006, I worked as an artist and educator. I also worked as assistant curator and administrator at The Australian Centre for Photography, Artspace Sydney, The Tin Sheds Gallery, Belvoir Street Theatre and The City of Sydney Sculpture Walk. In 1995, I moved to Dharug and Gundungurra Country (Blue Mountains World Heritage Area) in New South Wales, Australia and continued to work as an artist and educator. I have lived in the Blue Mountains with my partner, novelist, Trevor Shearston, since then. Our son, Corin Shearston, was born in 1997. Our home has studios, a wood workshop, a vegetable garden, orchard and a large native garden. 
A snapshot of Bette and Mum, sent to Grandma Elizabetta, in Malta.
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Education
In 1985, I graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts, majoring in photography and painting. (In 1984, as treasurer of the student union, I organised, with Cecily Cheo, the very first and highly successful graduation exhibition of visual arts students from Sydney College of the Arts in 1984.) 1996, I graduated with a Master of Fine Arts with First Class Honours from the University of New South Wales, majoring in photo-media and multimedia installations. In 2012, I graduated with a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the Western Sydney University, majoring in ecological art. My research included indigenous ecologies, sacred architecture, eco-psychology, social ecology, landscape painting and photography, garden design, environmental and public art. My doctoral exegesis is entitled, Coming to Ground: the Work of Art in Ecohumanism Art
Over my 40-year career I have engaged with photography’s inherent dualities: the negative and positive, realism and illusion, light and shadow, the seen and the unseen. I have examined how high-tech imaging technologies mediate our perception and understanding of material reality (Hallucinations and Other Facts 1988, Mute 1990). My interests extended to photography’s relationships with life and death (Vault Suite 1991), migration, identity, belonging (Landmarks Watermarks 1996), time and continuity—particularly in relation to portraiture and landscape. Much of my work is driven by experimentation with photographic technology and media, such as running 35mm film continuously through a modified 35mm SLR camera, or using liquid photographic emulsion on canvas and wood. My photo-media works are influenced by painting rather than by the conventions of photography, consequently, I primarily produce unique works rather than editions. At Sydney College of the Arts (1982-84), I blended photography and painting media, for example, by painting liquid emulsion on hand-made canvas panels and processing them in the darkroom like photographic paper. Later, I produced liquid emulsion photographs on 3D wooden works, hand-made photographs and hand-made slides and printed them. From 1989, I have produced digital photo-media works, multimedia installations, ecological art. In 1990, Fuji Film I&I Tokyo sponsored my installation Mute 1990 during my Australia Council residency there. Mute consists of giant wet darkroom E6 high-gloss transparencies each measuring 110 x 260 cm. Mute was exhibited as a solo show for three months at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1990-1991. These frameless transparencies were suspended from the gallery ceiling so that viewers saw themselves reflected, and their movement through the room animated the transparencies. For the past three decades, I have focused on portraiture, and landscape series and videos. At the same time, one of on-going my hobbies is making furniture from recycled wood, sustainable timbers and invasive trees such as poplar and camphor laurel that are abundant in rural eastern Australia. (My other love is native gardening and propagating native plants. We have a large native garden that is a haven for native wild life.) Recent landscape works and videos include images taken from a car while travelling through rural eastern Australia (Car Window, Dark Air, Breathing Rain 2021- 2023). Where the car window is a shifting screen framing fleeting landscape scenes. This exciting approach meant I relinquished compositional control and could not know just what the camera would capture. My woodwork hobby led to experimentation with, and ultimately the production of, transparent landscape photographs on wood (Fallow, 2024–26). These works were influenced by the landscape paintings of Theodore Rousseau who found beauty in unruly trees and uncultivated landscapes. (More about Fallow on the Series page.) Career Highlights & Awards
I have exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including in Amsterdam, Berlin, Malta, Tokyo, and other countries. In 1989, I was awarded the Australia Council for the Arts’ Tokyo studio residency, and spent the first six months of 1990 in Tokyo. While there, Fuji Film I&I sponsored my major work Mute, a cutting edge installation of giant suspended colour photographic film transparencies. Later that year Mute was exhibited for three months as a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. My numerous group exhibitions include the Lady Fairfax Prize for Photography, Australian Perspecta 1991, Citigroup Private Bank Australian Photographic Portrait Award; National Photographic Portrait Prize, Olive Cotton Photographic Portrait Award (twice) and the Hazelhurst Award for Art on Paper. As well as the Tokyo studio, I received four grants from The Australia Council for the Arts (now called Create Australia), and a Project Grant from the Australian Network for Art and Technology. In 2002, I was awarded a New South Wales Ministry for the Arts Inaugural Western Sydney Artist Fellowship. In 2003, I won the Hazelhurst Art Award Major Prize. In 2006, I was received an Australian Postgraduate Award through the Western Sydney University. My artworks are held in private, corporate and public collections in Australia and overseas. |
Wattle in Bette's garden