Here Is My Heart

Ray Monde’s paintings tell a story of queer life in rural Australia, grounded in the landscapes and waterways of the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. The river, recurring throughout his work, is a place of leisure and freedom, but also of refuge: a landscape through which personal history, belonging and the complexities of country life come into view.

Monde’s distinctive ghost-working technique involves the intricate layering of magazine pages and thin glazes of paint, allowing fragments of printed imagery to persist beneath the painted surface. These traces are integral to the work. Image and obscuration, presence and absence, become means of considering how memory inhabits a place, and how individual lives are recorded, concealed and revealed.

A two-time finalist in both the Blake Prize and the Paddington Art Prize, Monde has exhibited widely, with works held in collections in Australia and internationally. His exhibition The Places That Shape Us, presented at Maitland Regional Art Gallery, is now touring.