On the occasion of the artist's death in January 2025, this work was displayed with this label:

This work is displayed in warm memory of Philippa Blair. She was born in Ōtautahi Christchurch, and although she lived elsewhere – including in Los Angeles between 1995 and 2014 – she maintained strong and affectionate connections here. Early in her artmaking, Blair recalled the time spent as a child with her father, a scientist and mountaineer, in the soaring terrain of Te Tiritiri-o-te-moana, the Southern Alps. Her expressive paintings can appear abstract, but often began with the landscape, and with her personal experience of place. Canberra Spirit Woman was made during a three-month artist residency at the Canberra School of Art in 1984. Opening her studio so that students could keep an eye on her progress, Blair recorded her responses to the unfamiliar city “freshly, as they happened”, starting with the maps she used to find her way around.

Blair’s works often explore polarities: shelter and exposure, energy and rest, personal and universal, spirit and matter. Echoing road markings, the black and white lines in this composition are also a kind of visual punctuation. In her words:

They are running lines, a row of sewing stitches or the broken lines on a pattern that suggest the cutting edge. They express movement, moving from one state to another. They are border lines – the boundaries that hold us back. They are diagrammatic, it is as if they’re charting or mapping new territory.

Full of vivid colours and boundless energy, Blair’s paintings were also physically demanding. She painted them on the floor of her studio, enjoying how this gave her a bird’s eye view and kept her in the middle of the action. “They don’t come from my fingertips”, she once said, “they come from the arc action swing of my body”.

Vivid, unframed and abundant, this canvas sums up much of Blair’s approach to painting, and to life. “I think if you have a volatile and voracious spirit”, she said, “you want to be inside life rather than vicariously looking at other people doing it”.