In 1925 my grandmother Lucy caught the eye of Charles Chauvel — the Australian director who would later give Errol Flynn his first role. She was twenty. He offered her a part in a film. Her fiancé forbade it, and she did not take it.

She told me so herself. My mother, Audrey, told it to me the same way. Their testimony is my evidence, and it is where this work begins: a woman brought to the threshold of the light and held there.

I have spent my working life on the other side of that threshold.

I nearly went the other way. Before the make-up and before the painting I wanted to act — raised on Brando, Bogart, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and James Dean, and above all on Errol Flynn, who was ours. The symmetry has never left me: the director who offered my grandmother a part is the man who gave my idol his first. I changed my mind and crossed behind the camera instead — make-up and special effects, scenic art, and in time the portrait. She was kept from the light. I walked up to it and turned around.

That work made me a tradesman of illusion. I trained in theatrical and special-effects make-up at Studio B Academy in Brisbane, then worked for years in make-up, scenic art and production at Warner Bros. studios, Movie World, and across film, television and theatre. I have built the false fronts. I have painted the backdrop that reads as distance. I have watched a face be assembled by a department and then photographed as though it had simply arrived that way.

That is not a biographical detail in this exhibition. It is the reason I am able to make it. After The Golden Hour is a body of work about the industrial manufacture of a woman’s image, made by someone who worked on the floor where images are manufactured.