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Crime Scene Examiner with Serious Eye for Visual Ambiguities

Tasmanian policewoman Constable Heidi Barnes leads a double life. When not pouring over forensic evidence and analysing crime sites, Barnes breaks with police tradition completely and retreats to the privacy of her own artistic imagination.

Off duty, Barnes’ creative personality blossoms into a realm of artistic possibilities. Heading South: An exploration of Tasmanian Landscape, a series of her most recent paintings and textile images, were recently on display at the Eucalypt Cafe at Port Arthur. ‘‘I was an artist before I became a policewoman,’’ Barnes says, by way of gently reminding us that no two policemen or women are alike. ‘‘Forensics seems to attract unusual personalities so I fit in well.’’

A self-trained, part-time painter with a serious eye for visual ambiguities, Barnes joined the force in 2001 after completing an English Literature honour’s degree at the University of Tasmania in crime fiction and poetry. She fell in love with kitsch 1940s and 50s crime illustrations and film noir settings of accidents, robberies, assaults, suicides and murders. In real life, police work is never as melodramatic as murder thrillers or as well-lit TV cop shows of course, but Barnes was hooked nonetheless. ‘‘Could I do this as a job?’’ she asked herself at the end of her studies.

Now a Crime Scene Examiner in Tasmanian Police’s Forensic Services, Constable Barnes says she thinks as an artist even when peering through a microscope at blood and fibres. ‘‘It’s gruesome, but there’s something very decorative there too, the shapes and the colours are beautiful,’’ she said.

Last year she exhibited several paintings of local crime and accident scenes, including an unusual view of the Tasman Bridge early in the morning of the January 1975 accident. Her first inspector in the forensics unit was a young constable at the scene and took a photo of the site that Barnes found 30 years later in the police files. It gripped her imagination, so she turned the iconic image of the bridge’s gaping hole with cars dangling perilously at the edge of its torn concrete lip into a stunning painting.

‘‘I’m always finding interesting ideas for my paintings. When I drive past some sites, I just want to climb onto the roof of the car to get a better look,’’ she says. Barnes’ recent show is different from earlier subjects, but her new paintings reward closer looking. ‘‘Tasmanian landscape gives you the feeling you’re in a different country sometimes. The contrasts are amazing, but you have to look very closely, it can be very subtle,’’ she advises. Barnes loves the acidic yellow-greens of foliage and vivid oranges of Tasmanian lichens particularly. ‘‘The colours are almost unnatural, they’re so strong.’’

As a policewoman, Barnes’ professional exposure to human existence could not be more different from most Tasmanians, let alone local artists. But her unquenchable curiosity, imagination and adventurous love of bold colour are sure to be welcome gifts in both her chosen professions. 

(courtesy of the Mercury)