Shrimp On The Barbie 

Lucia Heffernan’s painting presents us with a wombat cheerfully grilling shrimp. The composition is straightforward, almost symmetrical, focusing our attention on the wombat. He’s set against a classic Australian landscape of blue sky and golden grass. Heffernan uses the contrast between the wombat's wildness and his very human activity to engage with structuralist ideas about nature versus culture. The wombat, dressed in an apron and wielding tongs, challenges our understanding of how animals are typically represented. The painting seems to invite us to destabilize meaning by blurring the boundaries between the animal kingdom and human social practices. The artist seems to ask: what happens when we apply human contexts to non-human subjects? This subversion questions how we categorize and assign meaning to our environment, opening avenues for a playful reinterpretation of the world around us.