Tamara Marrington and Luisa Hansal
1 february (a rock of hair), 2021, oil on canvas board, 25 x 30 cm
Tamara Marrington and Luisa Hansal
Top Shelf August 2025
Top Shelf: an in-house curated space for small artworks, rotated monthly.
A selection of 5 paintings from A Letter From Home, a series of 12 collaborative works by Luisa Hansal and Tamara Marrington.
Luisa Hansal and Tamara Marrington’s creative and personal relationship was formed when the two lived together in a sharehouse in Melbourne. Their collaborative paintings are an homage to friendship, to the ties of connection and affection that draw people together and keep them in each other’s orbit across distance and time.
With each painting referring to music, poetry and personal musings or witticisms, each work stands alone as a spark of mutual understanding and shared experiences. The series is also a material and conceptual challenge from one artist to another. Starting from a series of rules - ‘Have the phrase “Ghosts appear mostly in February” in mind as you paint, stick with 10” x 12” size format, only paint with oil paints, and only use these colours: yellow, indigo, Tasman blue, and white’ - each artist would begin a canvas and send it to the other to work on before returning it again. Eventually a new rule was added - ‘Drop one of the colours used in the previous painting and add another’. Presented as a complete series, a gradient emerges as a record of the changing nature of relationships, but also of their endurance despite the fluctuations of time and space. - Text by Miranda Johnson