Vicki White’s intimate photograph of her father’s last days won Palliative Care Australia’s art prize, transforming personal loss into a powerful tool for normalising conversations about mortality.
Vicki White never intended for anyone else to see the photograph. Taken during her father’s final hours, her artwork, ‘Tethered to Earth’, captured the intimacy of death, winning the overall prize of Palliative Care Australia’s Live Well Die Well Art Prize.
What began as a deeply personal image has taken Vicki on an unexpected journey over the course of 18-months, transforming private grief into a powerful driving force for public conversation about the art of living and dying well.
Art and difficult conversations
The Live Well Die Well Art Prize serves a unique purpose among art competitions. Rather than celebrating conventional subjects, the artworks serve as a visual challenge to the silence that surrounds death in our society. These artworks “help us see, feel, and understand what words cannot express alone,” said Camilla Rowland, CEO of Palliative Care Australia, at the awards event.
The Art Prize invited the public to explore the deeply human experiences of living, dying, and grieving through their submissions, creating a platform for artists to explore themes of mortality, grief, and end-of-life care while opening space for conversations all-too-often avoided.
Beauty in death
Just hours before her father died, Vicki and her sisters gathered at the family home to be with their father, Paul, who had been battling cancer for five years and was receiving palliative care at home.
In an ostensibly ordinary family moment—eating takeaway in the living room—the sisters were struck by the raw beauty of their father’s feet, gracefully tangled in the bedsheets.
“One of my sisters commented on how dad’s feet looked like one of my paintings,” said Vicki.
“We all just stopped and looked across at his feet. And I got up and I took a photograph.”
The resulting image captured more than initially met the eye. It was an image of the intimacy and beauty of death. A loved one in a raw moment, during the final stages of life. But more than this, Vicki had unknowingly captured a cluster of symbols alongside her father’s bed: a ticking clock, a family photograph, and a crucifix, all juxtaposed against one of humanity’s most universal experiences.
Initially, the image felt deeply private, meant only for her and her family. But over time, Vicki says she realised the importance of sharing it to help others talk about death and dying, and ultimately, to process her grief.
In this, Vicki found herself transitioning from being solely a daughter in mourning to someone who could also create space for others.
From fear to peace
Despite her father’s five-year cancer journey, Vicki says she and her family struggled with end-of-life care’s challenges. “I don’t think we really understood what we were going to go through,” she said. “I was scared.”
The fear wasn’t just about death itself. She was also fearful of being present for her father’s final breath.
The night before her father died, when she captured ‘Tethered to Earth’, a thunderstorm rolled in, cockatoos raced past the windows, and nature became the soundtrack to what Vicki describes as a ‘spiritual crying’. Her father, though unconscious, seemed to respond to their voices. “It felt like he realised he was going, leaving us, and didn’t want to but he couldn’t say it.”
It was an experience that drove Vicki to seek understanding and connection. She visited death cafes, community gatherings discussing mortality, and found crucial support alongside guidance she hadn’t known she needed.
Now, she says she’s come to realise fear wasn’t an emotion she needed to make space for during her father’s final moments. “I feel really at peace,” she said. It’s a realisation she wants to share with others, particularly through her artwork ‘Tethered to Earth’, so conversations about death are brought to the fore rather than shrouded in fear. “I want people to not be fearful of death,” she explains. Her artwork reflects this philosophy, even though it wasn’t intentional at the time.
Looking at ‘Tethered to Earth’, fear seems absent from the frame. Through her artistic lens, Vicki had unconsciously captured the peace in death.
A ripple for change
Vicki’s artwork, with its subtle symbolism and intimate portrayal of dying, demonstrates art’s capacity to make the abstract concrete and the fearful familiar.
Through capturing and sharing part of her father’s end-of-life experience, Vicki, alongside the other artists in the exhibition, is normalising one of the most universal human experiences, opening up conversations about death and dying, and what it means to live and die well.
In this way, ‘Tethered to Earth’ expresses what words cannot, helping us to see, feel, and understand death in a way that reaches us emotionally before intellectually.
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This article was first published on the PCA website and is republished here with permission.
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