Part of my narrative tracking my family migration to Australia involved photos of my early years. Here I am on my mother's lap, in the shade of a gum tree at Cowra migrant camp. I created this image as part of a body of work for my Master of Design [Hons] at COFA, College of Fine Arts, Sydney 2003. I was raised within my mother's religious tradition, eastern European catholicism. That tradition teaches boys to emulate the christ child and girls his mother. With that understood, my depiction of my mother and myself was an ironic treatment of the renaissance imagery I was accustomed to in my childhood. It was a statement of the emotional furniture of my upbringing; but it also clarified my mother's quiet assumption of her role as nurturer, as virgoan earth mother. The photo I used in this work came from a classic 1950's box brownie, beautifully clear, but by now black, grey, sepia, with a myriad of surface scratches. These suggested the hissing, crackling bush of an Australian outback summer, the deep shadows, twigs, fronds of leaves, and crawling insects are all abstracted in the mass of marks and twiggy gestures.