Family Portrait 

Lucia Heffernan created this Family Portrait with oil on canvas, presenting a whimsical reinterpretation of a traditional genre. The painting’s composition is divided into vertical black and white stripes creating a rigid background which contrasts starkly with the soft, rounded forms of the sheep. Heffernan plays with scale and texture, dressing each sheep in human attire, which creates a semiotic disruption. The sheep's garments—neckties, pearls, bows—act as signifiers of human identity, challenging our conventional understanding of representation by blending animal and human traits. The sheep invite viewers to negotiate the boundaries between nature and culture. Consider, for example, the dark sheep holding a cocktail; it is adorned with sunglasses and a lei. Through these constructed binaries, Heffernan destabilizes established meanings and invites ongoing interpretation, suggesting that art is a site of continuous dialogue.