‘It’s like they’re time travellers’: the peculiar portrait of an artist’s parents, bought by a friend

Visitors are often ‘baffled as to why I would have photos of elderly people who aren’t my parents’, but Anna Guthrie finds joy and comfort in Sanja Pahoki’s work. Photograph: Penny Stephens/The Guardian

When Anna Guthrie was working at a Melbourne addiction treatment centre 20 years ago, she could hardly have guessed that a portrait of a colleague’s parents would become one of her favourite artworks.

Her co-worker was artist Sanja Pahoki, and at an exhibition in 2006, Pahoki’s curious triptych of her mother and father, titled Up in the Sky, seized Guthrie’s imagination.