Bendigo artist Lauren Starr's ghosts now live in frames.
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"They have haunted me, really," Ms Starr said.
"And I know they are stories that I have to make because they do not leave me alone."
Ms Starr's haunting explores the pioneering, though largely unheard of stories of women living in the Australian gold-rush period.
"I want to raise these women up and bring them into the light so that people know their stories and remember their names," she said.
Finding the stories of these women "living amongst the dust and masculine world" of 1850s Australia - the period in which the artist's own family settled in Australia - was a lesson in uncovering a "underrepresented" history, according to Ms Starr.
"Women are completely underrepresented in that period in our history," she said.
"But I wanted to know more about the women who came before me, what they were like, what they looked like."
Ms Starr unveiled a sneak-peek of her project entitled Luminaries: reimagining women in the Australian Goldfields at Mackenzie Quarters on Friday, September 1, while looking to complete more works in the coming months.
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With the project's research encompassing a period of little to no photographs, Ms Starr said she had an intuitive response to how she wanted to physically represent the women in her "reimaginings".
"I would read a story or sometimes it was just a sentence, and I might get goosebumps, and I'd get the visual in my head and go out and create that," she said.
While Ms Starr looks to explore other underwritten female pioneers beyond the Luminaries project - including women convicts or early female settlers - she said she still had more stories to tell from the Goldfields.
"I just keep thinking about them, I'll visualize them and I'll see them in my head," she said.
"There is a life's worth of work out there."
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