After a decade down south studying and establishing her career as a prosthetist-orthotist, Camille Wiseman, 28, returned home to Bangalow earlier this year – via a 12-month sabbatical in Italy honing her formidable skills as a painter. Georgia Fox found out more.
For most kids, tagging along with your dad to Friday beers at his best mate’s place might have been pretty boring – but not if, like Camille Wiseman, your dad’s best mate happened to be a prosthetist with a shed full of arms and legs amid cows, chickens and sheep. “A wonderland of spare human parts,” laughs Camille of her child’s-eye view of Peter Farrand’s workshop on his Broken Head farm.
While her dad was inadvertently imprinting a future in prosthetics, her art-loving mum was nurturing her creative side. Recognising Camille’s natural talent – no doubt inherited from her own mother, an accomplished abstract painter back in her hometown of New Orleans – she enrolled Camille in Sue Holm’s after-school art classes at the Scout Hall.
“Sue was just incredible,” Camille says. “She taught art classes that weren’t just a novelty. Even though we were only primary school kids, there were no colouring sheets or mindless activities – it was very much about understanding how different mediums work.”
While painting remained a constant, Camille’s priorities were more academic. After graduating from Byron High, she moved to Melbourne and completed a Bachelor of Biomedicine with a view to pursuing medicine. But something didn’t feel quite right. “It’s such a competitive and expensive degree, you want to be really sure about it,” she says.
A career as a prosthetist-orthotist (P&O) had always been in the mix – especially after her dad joined the managerial side of Peter’s business years earlier and, ironically, lost two of his own fingers in a circular saw incident at the Broken Head shed. But armed with the clinical experience gained during her biomedicine degree, she knew for certain it was the right fit.
Working at the intersection of healthcare, biomechanics, custom fabrication and rehabilitation, P&Os occupy one of the most multidisciplinary roles in allied health. It was exactly this breadth of practice that appealed to Camille: “It allowed me to still be a clinician working in hospitals and helping people, but I also got to use my hands and make stuff.”
Freshly minted from her two-year Master of Clinical Prosthetics and Orthotics, Camille moved to Wollongong to work for one of the larger clinics in NSW, joining the astonishingly small ranks of just 550 P&Os nationwide. In a country as vast as Australia, that can mean a substantial amount of time on the road servicing sprawling regional catchments.
During her two years in Wollongong, her paintings became increasingly preoccupied with water. “Not just the ocean,” she explains, “but rivers and clouds and the flow of water in every form.” The ‘blue humanities’ – an emerging interdisciplinary field exploring our relationship with water – resonated deeply, and fish began to feature prominently in her work, culminating in her first solo show in late 2024, ‘We Devour the Ocean’.
As well as using fish symbolically, Camille explains she simply likes the way they look. “They’re fun to paint,” she laughs. “You can do anything with them. I love to make up pretend fish. They come in all shapes and sizes, so they’re a very useful artistic element.”
When her partner Marcus was accepted into a program at the University of Trento in Northern Italy as part of his master’s in mechatronics engineering, Camille seized the opportunity to embark on her own European painting sabbatical. Taking 12 months off with the blessing of her employer, the pair arrived in the picturesque alpine city in early 2025.
Setting up a studio in their lounge room, Camille continued her solo practice and sought out atelier-style training – her first formal classes since afternoons at the Scout Hall with Sue. Over the course of the year, she attended three six-week intensives: figure painting in regional France, portrait painting in New York, and fresco painting in Florence.
“I feel like I learned more in those three courses than an entire life of trying to figure it out on my own,” she says. “I think there’s something to be said for being self-taught and working things out yourself, but sometimes it’s really lovely to have somebody point you in the right direction.”
Between intensives, life in Trento was idyllic, with Camille and Marcus becoming engaged, and Camille working on one of her largest and most challenging pieces to date, The Fish and the Caretaker. Rich in symbolism and steeped in the European tradition, the work distills Camille’s time in Italy onto the canvas, documenting her technical evolution in real time.
The work was recognised with two international prizes – coming second in the Emerging Artist Award in the 2025 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, and third in the TOSEE Art Competition. Its later inclusion in a group show in Milan brought an extraordinary year abroad to a fittingly wonderful close.
Hitting the ground running, within days of returning to Australia earlier this year, Camille exhibited her overseas work in a group surrealist show in Sydney. Asked if she would categorise herself as a surrealist, Camille reflects, “I would say I’m surreal-leaning – drawing on ideas of dreams, the subconscious, symbolism and allegory. I like work that has some sort of meaning.”
Before the show had even opened, Camille was back in her childhood bedroom in Bangalow and immediately reporting for work in Ballina – to none other than Peter Farrand, who long ago outgrew the shed at Broken Head to build a network of prosthetic clinics that recently merged with Spao Ottobock Care, conveniently encompassing Camille’s former clinic in Wollongong.
Her dad’s there too – when he’s not somewhere on the road between Brisbane and Nowra helping run the newly expanded network.
Camille continues to put all the technical gains of the last year into practice, working towards her next solo show – albeit with smaller canvases at the moment. Between full-time work, recently becoming an aunty, ducking down to Melbourne to see Marcus as he finishes his degree, and planning their January wedding, life is a bit less Trento-paced for now.
She’s unsure where they’ll settle after Marcus graduates, given his equally niche but less transferable career in mechatronics. But with only one P&O for every 14,000 square kilometres of Australia, Camille’s happy to just go with the flow. Like a fish.
@camillekathryn