Fleurieu Biennale Art Prize

While I was working on this piece my nine-year-old son came up and stood alongside me, watching. After a while, out of the blue, he quietly said, “You know mum, when you die I’m going to put your ashes in that pond.”

I have a photograph somewhere of my mother pregnant with me sitting on the edge of this same rock pool. There are others of me as a child playing in it. I take my kids there now.

The sense of place starts early, and clearly connects deeply when a child of nine can take your breath away with their sense of it.

I asked if he’d put my parents’ ashes there with me when the time came.

John Neylon in his review of the prize published in the July The Adelaide Review said "...and, one of the most powerful images in the show, Margaret Ambridge's Sellicks, an anticipation of life's end set in a simple rock pool."