Bette Mifsud

'This mural has its earliest origins in my childhood work on a market garden in western Sydney where I began collecting decorated china shards and making landscape photographs.   Landscape photographs and pictorial china shards share the similarity of being mysterious and isolated fragments of the world.   Both photographs and shards are also always of another time.' Bette Mifsud.

Nineteen different landscape photographs (or segments thereof) spanning 25 years in rural eastern Australia have been connected to form this one 'continuous' picture.

Significantly, this work followed Landmarks Watermarks , 1996, and, The Living Room , 2000. Both works have their origin in a subconscious need to reconcile my European/Australian heritage, while at the same time, seeking a true connection to all life.

Fugitive Ground could be seen as a journey through a metaphoric place and time represented as landscape.

Fugitive Ground was produced with the assistance of the NSW Ministry for the Arts' 2002 Inaugural Western Sydney Artists Fellowship.

It won the major prize in the 2003 Hazelhurst Art Award for Art on Paper, judged by Roger Butler, Senior Curator of Australian Prints and Drawings from the National Gallery of Australia.