Family Mirror, 2017

Where ‘Grief Tree’ is implicitly universal, the virtuoso graphite drawing ‘Family Mirror’, 2017, returns us to those close to Ballard herself. It depicts an occluded, tarnished mirror in which we can see no current reflection, but can muse on the history of who has been reflected in it: in this case, all the members of Ballard’s family, making it a poignant group version of Ballard’s abstract portraits of her parents.