When Dr Bronwyn Bancroft sat the Higher School Certificate, she created a major work for the HSC art subject depicting a sunrise and a sunset with two women joined in the pubic area.

Exam markers said it was about lesbianism and struck it from public show. “It wasn’t about that at all,” Bancroft says. “It was just an artwork about the sunrise and sunset.”

It was a formative first lesson in who controlled the narrative in the art world and, Bancroft says, increasingly it’s not the artist.

Bancroft wears a hat and long Heidi-style pigtails draped over her shoulders as she assists with the installation of the 100 or so artworks that form part of her major retrospective, stretching back five decades. The exhibition covers expansive ground from early art school projects rephotographing her g

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