The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders both past and present.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this website contains images of deceased persons.
Audio description
5 minutes 5 seconds
The portrait is of Turia Pitt, athlete, motivational speaker and author. It is an inkjet print on paper taken in 2017 by Peter Brew-Bevan for Marie Claire magazine. The portrait measures one metre tall by one-point-four metres wide and is surrounded by a wide white border and slender light-coloured wooden frame.
Turia is shown in what appears to have been a once glamorous, now dilapidated, interior. She looks up at us from a sofa she is reclining on. She wears a dramatic ballgown with voluminous layered skirts covering her legs and spilling over the sofa onto the floor.
The photograph is set in the corner of a room, slightly off centre, so that more of the left wall is shown than the right. The left wall is decorated with wainscoting, however the elegant frames and panels, once painted white, are patchy and grey. Propped on an angle between the left and right walls is a large empty rectangular frame. Its fine geometric embellishments gleam with bright gold leaf. Abutting the charred wall and visible behind the frame is a section of light blue-green wall, then a pair of double doors, all stained with grey. The doors have frames that were once white surrounding creamy-beige rectangular panels themselves accented by narrow frames in dark blue.
The floor of the room is covered by an ornately patterned carpet. Its intricate floral designs in cream deep-red and mint-green are darkened with grime and splattered with small white specks of paint.
Placed in the centre of the scene is a chesterfield sofa, its generous studded upholstery a pale gold silk. Over its rolled arms the fabric is torn and split, revealing yellowed foam padding beneath. The sofa sits on round, dark wood ‘bun’ feet and tiny brass caster wheels. Turia reclines across the chesterfield. She is positioned on the right with her back leaning in the corner of the sofa between its arm and back. Her dark hair parted on the side is gathered at the nape of her neck in a messy bun. Turia’s face is angled slightly down and towards the right of the portrait. This side is in shade, while light touches it from the left of the scene. The skin on her face, as with that on her neck and arms, looks a tanned, honey-brown, but mottled stretched shiny and puckered with deep burn scars. Turia’s right eyebrow is fine and dark, arching up from its inner point then steeply down to end in line with the outer corner of her eye. Turia’s eyes are dark green, the whites bright, ringed by dark eyeshadow. They look up and at us. Her nose is straight leading to full lips faintly tinged with pink, closed, but smiling.
Turia has a deep ‘v’ shaped groove where the taut muscles of her neck meet at its base. Her left shoulder is slightly raised, with her arm resting along the back of the sofa. Turia’s right shoulder is dropped, with her arm extending behind her and over the side of the torn chesterfield.
She wears a midnight-blue and white ballgown, with an asymmetrical ‘v’ neck and large layered skirt. The almost black bodice has a fitted structural base overlayed by sheer fabrics, embellished with feathers and tiny shining beads in the same colour. The right shoulder is covered with a short puffy sleeve. The midnight-blue upper layers of the skirt are a haphazard arrangement of pleats and ruffles. Where many layers combine, the gauzy fabric is a dense black, in other parts, one or two layers create different shades and shapes as they sit over many underskirts of white fabrics. White tulle, a layer of more structural white fabric, and a final layer of spotted blue-black sheer material, complete the gown. This generous skirt and its expansive fabric layers cover most of the sofa, draping over its edge and falling onto the carpet, obscuring Turia’s legs and feet.
Audio description written and voiced by Lucinda Shawcross
The Gallery’s Acknowledgement of Country, and information on culturally sensitive and restricted content and the use of historic language in the collection can be found here.
inkjet print on paper (sheet: 101 cm x 140 cm, frame: 105.3 cm x 144.4 cmdepth 4.3 cm)
Turia Pitt (b. 1987), author, businesswoman, motivational speaker and athlete, grew up in Ulladulla, New South Wales and studied engineering and science at the University of NSW, graduating in 2010. The following year, she became trapped by a grassfire during an ultramarathon run through the Kimberley region in Western Australia. By the time help arrived, she had suffered severe burns to 65 per cent of her body and wasn't expected to live. Placed in a medically-induced coma for a month, she endured more than 100 surgeries and 864 days in hospital. Since 2014, when the Western Australian Supreme Court ruled in her favour in an action against the organisers of the race, Pitt has built a successful online self-help business, written three books, and raised more than $1 million for the organisation ReSurge International by walking the Great Wall of China (2014), the Inca Trail (2015) and the Kokoda Track (2016). In 2016 she competed in both the Ironman Australia and Ironman World Championship events.
Peter Brew-Bevan's photograph of Pitt captures her beauty, strength and tenacity. 'I had to claw my way back into life, learn to walk, learn to talk,' she told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2014. 'All the things I had taken for granted before became seemingly impossible tasks.' This image appeared in a feature in Marie Claire in 2017.
The National Portrait Gallery respects the artistic and intellectual property rights of others. Works of art from the collection are reproduced as per the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). The use of images of works from the collection may be restricted under the Act. Requests for a reproduction of a work of art can be made through a Reproduction request. For further information please contact NPG Copyright.