20¢ Bag of Lollies Collection
Artist Statement
20¢ Bag of Lollies is a photographic digital art collection built around memory, nostalgia and the quiet traces left behind by the places and experiences that shaped us.
The series takes its name from something once wonderfully ordinary — walking into the local milk bar with twenty cents and leaving with a small paper bag filled with lollies. It is a memory belonging to another time, but one that can instantly unlock a much larger world.
Throughout the collection, a solitary older man dressed in red moves through familiar yet reconstructed Australian environments. He appears at milk bars, suburban streets, beaches, swimming pools, corner shops and other places that feel as though they might have existed somewhere in our own past. Sometimes he is an observer. Sometimes he appears to be waiting. At other times, he simply occupies the landscape, caught in a moment between what was and what remains.
The red of his clothing acts as a visual thread through the collection, set against a restrained palette of cool blues and muted surroundings. His presence gives scale to the environments while introducing something more personal: solitude, ageing, memory and the strange experience of looking back at a world that once seemed permanent.
As a photographic digital artist, I construct each artwork from multiple visual sources, including my own photography of real-world people, objects, locations and textures, imagery from my extensive photographic archive, licensed stock imagery and digitally created elements. These components are extensively manipulated, reworked and composited to create the final image.
The environments are deliberately constructed rather than documentary. Places are simplified, altered or combined; unnecessary elements disappear; scale and perspective can shift. What remains is not intended to reproduce a particular location exactly, but to capture the feeling of remembering it.
Having grown up in Australia in the late 1960s, 70s and 80s, I am fascinated by the ordinary things that quietly disappear from everyday life — the local milk bar, neighbourhood shops, old service stations, suburban pools, caravan holidays, handwritten signs and places where people once gathered without giving them much thought.
They were rarely considered important at the time.
Decades later, they can carry enormous emotional weight.
That tension sits at the heart of 20¢ Bag of Lollies. The work is nostalgic, but it is not simply about recreating the past. It explores what happens when memory, time and imagination begin to overlap — when the places we remember become less precise, more cinematic and perhaps more meaningful than they ever were when we were actually there.
The solitary man in red continues through these constructed worlds as both participant and observer. Perhaps he is remembering them. Perhaps we are remembering them through him.
Because sometimes the smallest memory — even a 20¢ bag of lollies — can contain an entire world.
SHOP 20¢ BAG OF LOLLIES HERE
Check out the complete Lisa Saad 2026 Collection Catalogue to see the full series.
All artworks by Lisa Saad are produced as limited-edition fine-art photographic prints and framed canvas prints. Each work is professionally printed using archival-quality giclée printing processes with archival pigment inks on premium fine art paper or museum-grade canvas substrates to ensure exceptional longevity, colour stability and presentation quality.
All edition works are individually numbered and accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity. Edition details are noted on the artwork and/or accompanying documentation.
Lisa Saad’s photographic digital art practice combines original photography and imagery from her extensive photographic archive with appropriately licensed source material, digitally created elements and, where relevant, selected emerging technologies. Adobe Photoshop remains the primary environment in which these elements are extensively manipulated, reconstructed, composited and refined to create the final artworks.