‘I called her Nanny’ is a reminiscence of a personal experience with my Grandmother during my teen years. 

A reflection on the experience of mental ill-health ‘I called her nanny’ explores the visceral experience of caring for a loved one in their darkest hours. The painting is a vignette of a time and place, one that is deeply rooted in my memories. The composition invokes classical paintings of the bedside and mourning poses. 

The black dog is the ominous but constant presence of severe melancholia, the ‘family pet’ that I will inherit with Nanny’s passing. The colours, lighting, and the curtains are exaggerated to evoke the language of dreamscapes because my memory of this personal moment has been heightened and altered by the passing of time and neurological processes to become hyper-real and deeply significant to my psyche.
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Story Transcript:

"I called her ‘Nanny.

 At her funeral people talked about her life and all the things she did and the places she went, they talked about how funny she was, how she loved sport and drinking beer with her meals.

She was a wife and Mother, a loved sister and caregiver and was always dressed smartly with her hair quaffed high and set with spray.

A tomboy in pearls, Nanny was born in country NSW where she spent most of her life, she was a stay at home Mum for most of her life who never learnt to drive and became more and more dependant on her children as the years passed.

Nanny was a complex woman who lived a simple life.

When I was little we’d spend the weekends together playing catch on the lawn with a faded leather football, we’d go hunting for snails in her garden and squash them in our gumboots in the rain, squealing with gruesome delight.

But at some point in my early childhood that Nanny left without leaving a note.

She went out for milk and never came back, leaving behind a woman I had never seen before. 

This Nanny was sad, so sad, and I just didn’t understand.  They never talked about this version of Nanny at her funeral, she didn’t get a mention.

I didn’t understand that either, she was the woman I had known for most of my life and I loved her too.

Don’t get me wrong, some days I wanted to just shake her and bring back the woman I met so briefly. 

But I felt connected to this version of Nanny, some strange siren call of sadness, buried deep in my DNA that I didn’t understand.

As a teenager I used to sit up at night and try to comfort her. Brushing her hair as she cried, working out the stiff hairspray from her silver locks.

She would look so empty, the green dappled light from the street light outside shining on her face.
 As I got older, like Nanny, I too would go through periods of being sad… so sad, the kind of sad where you could sleep forever.

So Nanny, if you’re listening, I will never forget that memory, or that wallpaper or the feel of your hair softening between my fingers.

I understand the sadness, and sometimes when I’m in that place of being sad… so sad, so sad, the kind of sad where you could sleep forever I imagine that you’re there, brushing my hair, and accepting me for who I am, warts and all."

I Called Her Nanny

‘Choke Bitch’ is a personal response to a high school trauma steeped in late-2000s toxic hyper-masculinity. My severe asthma was weaponised by a gang of 13 year old devotees of ‘MTV frat bros on spring break’ who attacked me in a school closet with cans of Lynx deodorant.

The work critiques and exposes teenage boy toxicity - a heady mix of testosterone, misogyny and a ‘boys will be boys’ lack of consequences.

The deodorant cans are made from porcelain to expose the fragility of pubescent masculinity. The words ‘Choke, Bitch’ are inscribed on the cans. The used and abandoned cans sit on a plinth coated in a spray of toxic-green enamel paint, a metaphor for the lingering after-effects of toxic masculinity on young women. 

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Audio Transcript:

Have you ever inhaled a scent so visceral, so gut wrenchingly potent it jolts you out of the now and transports you back to a time and place, rooted deep somewhere in the subliminal.

For me, that smell is the sickeningly pungent stench of Lynx body-spray. 

As those who attended high-school in the early 2000’s will attest, this fragrance brings to mind imagery of red faced teen boys, dripping in perspiration, jostling for a place in the pack, brimming with testosterone and heady with the stench of toxic masculinity.

But there’s one particular incident rooted deeply in this smell I’ll never forget. 	

I didn’t understand at the time why he hated me.

I hadn’t done anything to him, I hadn’t poured chunky rotten milk in his backpack, I hadn’t pushed him down the stairs on the way to homeroom, I hadn't pissed on his lunch, and I certainly didn’t tell him day in day out that he should kill himself (although sometimes I thought it.)

I didn’t make each day a living hell for him, I just existed, and that was enough. 

I actually enjoyed PE, despite what most would think. I was a severe asthmatic and bloated by steroids, exercise was a trigger for me but I did my best.   My Mum had diligently let the school know that I was a severe asthmatic and that aerosols needed to be banned from use at school.

The PE teachers divulged these new rules and implemented them as well as any teacher who hated fat kids would.

So him and his posse of slack jawed sidekicks had their new ammunition.

I was walking to the bathroom after changing from PE when I felt the tug on my backpack, I fell back as I was dragged into the boys changing room. 


My eyes began to water as my throat constricted, my senses bulldozed as the particles hung thick in the air.

They held the door shut as I stopped breathing, there were empty cans of Lynx scattered on the cement floor.

I could hear them chanting, “choke, bitch - choke, bitch” interspersed with muffled laughter.

I don’t remember much that happened after that, those boys maybe received a detention. No change of any substance was made.

I now understand that he didn’t hate me, he was a reflection of a time and place. 

One that stank like Lynx Africa, where boys could do what they pleased, where ad campaigns were built on naughty jokes and blunt promises.

I will never forget this trauma or that smell. 

I guess this wasn’t the lynx effect they were hoping for.

Ebony Wightman