her career, as she later decided to pursue full-time career as an artist. For 20 years, she frequently visited Aboriginal communities in central Australia and Darwin with a group of female artists in search of inspirations of her landscape paintings and portraits. During her travels, she met the Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, whom she developed a special relationship with as a fellow elderly female artist and became the subject of her portraits now collected by the National Portrait Gallery. She has been working on her art in her private studio located in Double Bay, Sydney since 1985, and regularly held exhibitions in Sydney and Canberra since 1988. The National Portrait Gallery honoured Sages’ unique ability to capture the relationship between the artists and the subject and process of portrait making in her paintings with the exhibition Jenny Sages: Paths to Portraiture in 2010 and 2011, displaying four large-scale portraits and other related materials, artworks, and sketches. The exhibition went on tour in five other locations (Tweed, Toowoomba, Mackay, Burnie and Mosman) with a more expansive collection of Sages’ work. Among the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, the portraits of artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, author Helen Garner, and the late ballerina Irina Baronova are permanently on display. Sages has also taken up the role as a judge for the Adelaide Perry prize in 2013. Influence Jenny Sages’s portrait of Emily Kame Kngwarrey, Emily Kame Kngwarreye with Lily (1993), was the first work collected by the newly founded National Portrait Gallery in 1998. Art historian Dr. Sarah Engledow pointed out that Andrew Sayers, the first director of the National Portrait Gallery purchased this portrait as a purpose of not positioning the institution in a British Colonial text-book narrative. Sages’ portrait Jackie and Kerryn depicting politician Kerryn Phelps and her wife Jackie Stricker won the 2001 Archibald Prize. The portrait played a role in maintaining the high-profile lesbian couple’s media and cultural visibility. Artworks Material and Artistic Methods Sages was one of the pioneering artists in Australia to apply the encaustic method to her paintings, as she was inspired by the Fayum portraits of Ancient Egypt. All of her paintings were created on the surface of MDF boards coated with wax. According to journalist Elizabeth Wilson’s observations in 2011, Sages spends a great amount of time on preparatory work, from making markings on the boards to rubbing the incisions with oil and pigment,