Australian singer-songwriter Jessica Cerro,the subject of Gutman’s Archibald Prize-winning portrait,is a force to be reckoned with.
The Sydney-born-and-raised performer released her debut album Glorious Heightsin 2016,winning the ARIA award for Breakthrough Artist the same year. If it’s not bangers such asBecause I Love YouandTill It Kills Me that you know,you might recognise Cerro from one of the world’s biggest stages,Eurovision.
She performed the songTechnicolourat the 2021 iteration of the event,after the 2020 one was cancelled (but unfortunately did not qualify for the semi-final). More recently,the 27-year-old has turned her attention to other artistic endeavors including making her theatre debut playing Achilles’ mother Thetis inHolding Achilles,a queer retelling of part of Homer’sIliad, that premiered at QPAC in Brisbane last year before embarking on a national tour.
Cerro’s latest album,Making It, was a hyper-pop explosion that looked to capture the joy of the creative life,of collaboration,of making art for its own sake rather than any external arbiter of success. In a press note around its release,Cerro said,“I used to want to be big. Now I just want to be able to make music forever and have children.”
“I wasn’t exactly sick of it,” Cerro said of the Eurovision circus in an interview with. “It just stressed me out immensely. I think the strangest thing about[Eurovision] is that you spend,like,a whole year to make just three minutes of your entire life good. The kind of perfection that’s required freaked me out because I know I’m a deeply chaotic and messy person,especially with my creative output. My thing is,‘Let’s turn up and see what happens!’,and with Eurovision there’s no room for those accidents. Going into it as that kind of person was a very vulnerable thing.”