Linda Brescia has some advice for her fellow residents at Parramatta Artists Studios.
"It is funny I was talking to a couple of artists yesterday and they were talking about their date of birth and, yes, they could be my kids," she says.
"But I don't want to be their mother. I mother enough here."
Yet her work space is stocked with biscuits and home-made brownies to share with fellow artists.
A mother of four adult children, Brescia draws on those experiences in The Persona and Performance of Everyday Life, a series of photographs that depicts the artist in a bodysuit stretching her head and eating her own face.
Brescia says the work, which will be shown in the group exhibition Façade, originated from feelings of being invisible and overlooked in social situations.
"They were really about how I felt about being a middle-aged housewife," she says, adding:
"Oh God, I want to run away from that but it's the truth."
Brescia, whose artistic career began at age 40, says the work also confronts impossible standards of beauty demanded of women.
"All that stretching doesn't make any difference and it's about accepting the way you look," she says.
"Maybe people can relate to it in that we're all not happy when we look in the mirror."
Brescia is one of seven past and present residents of the Parramatta Artists Studios whose work will be exhibited in Façade at Artereal Gallery in Rozelle.
More than 100 artists have worked at the studios since 2006, and co-ordinator Sophia Kouyoumdjian says the facility is unique for western Sydney.
"Providing so many studios in the one location means that Parramatta Artists Studios has developed a strong collegiate environment where artists not only make work, but also inhabit, reflect and gain inspiration from the Parramatta, as well as imbue it with an ever-growing presence of creativity."
The 53-year-old Brescia is doing her second residency at the studios and agrees they provide an invaluable place of work and inspiration.
"For me, it enables me to get in my car and leave home and go to a place of work and there are other artists there as well as getting support from well, it's Parramatta Council," she says.
"Being at home, I'm not making that contact with other artists, there's less opportunities. That's the great thing about being at the studio."
Former resident Liam Benson says he believes he shares a common western Sydney identity and sense of humour with other residents at the Parramatta Artists Studios.
"We all understand we have to slog it out," he says.
"We all have to travel further. We come from suburban homes, some live with our families, but we have a real balance between home life and being an artist."
Benson's Fortitudine features the artist singing Scottish folk song My Ain Folk, a sentimental song taught to him by his mother, in one video, while another shows him dissolving into tears.
"I've lost a lot of family members in the past four years," he says.
"My mother passed away in 2011 and then my grandmother and father - all the people who raised me.
"I really just channelled my emotion."
Benson, 34, says the work is part of his ongoing examination of Australian masculinity and examines how men express or conceal their emotions.
"That's what I do in my work I look at what's happening in my life," he says.
"It has an element of portraiture because it's about me talking about my journey and figuring out who I am.
"I see what's happening to me as a metaphor for what's happening in Australia."
Façade, an exhibition of past and current Parramatta Artists Studios residents, is at Artereal Gallery from April 1 to May 2.
