Can you imagine being a progressively more feline-looking Australian actress? Waking up to having Freaky Friday-ed with Nicole Kidman (and yes this is the first step in that process) I feel my brittle, perfectly manicured, hands straining against satin sheets as I emerge with a (Days style) perfectly applied face of makeup to eat chopped up fruit. Of course I’m sure Nicole wakes up and dazedly looks for the loo like the rest of us, but Nicole Kidman does not.

A woman who cries, a woman who drives, a woman who wears wigs, a woman who married and divorced and adopted a baby with Tom Cruise while being a consummate practitioner of her craft (and a slighted stilted figure of the red carpet) Nicole Kidman embodies a sense of herself. That spectre is what has captured my, and several other homosexuals’, imagination. These paintings are a journey in which I ambiguate her professional and personal life, considering how this dual role is shorthand for a nebulous-but-shared sense of community and communication.

The best way to unpack this would be to think of how images of Nicole Kidman are used to communicate or affirm a sense of gay piety on the internet; vis-à-vis punctuating small inconveniences with expressions of divine feminine. Much like with Judy Garland, Brenda Fassie, Princess Diana, Oprah this invocation is not simply a reference to a person but rosary of adoration to invoke our lady of the Sunshine Coast. Without having to dress for mass Nicole Kidman offers the embrace of communal belief, or least the embrace of discreet facelifts.

I want to end this with a few lines from the Frank O’Hara poem (and possibly prayer), To the Film Industry in Crisis, from which this body of work takes its name:

“Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances, delays and enunciations, and may the money of the world glitteringly cover you as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your faces in packs for our edification, the way the clouds come often at night but the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine precedent you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!”