Attendant was part of a Sydney Mardi Gras Exhibition at the Object Galleries at Customs House, Sydney in 1999. It was one of five tapestries I combined as an iconic, quasi-religious altarpiece of images. My work attracted media attention by the art critic of the Sydney Morning Herald. When I had begun to weave tapestry in the mid 1970's my influences were oriental. From China and Japan I learned the importance of deliberation as part of the art process. The artist gathers together energy and focus then in a dynamic moment unleashes that energy in a mark or gesture. From the middle east, the sufis, I learned that weaving is a craft that can be a path of spiritual development. My visual teachers of the west were the post impressionists: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Jawlensky and Andre Derain. The use of expressionist mark-making, or pointillism that these artists employed was something I wanted to express in tapestry also. As in Japanese art-making I felt that any depiction, a portrait, for instance the Attendant, was a dialogue between representation and an abstracted field of marks and gestures. A portrait required that eyes, mouth, ears be recognisable, but the intensity of the dialogue, the process, would determine how realistic the image would be.