National Portrait Gallery director Karen Quinlan says the collection is more than a photo album

She says when she made the decision to purchase a work by Australian Patricia Piccinini back in 2003, the artist was poised for greatness.

The work, The Young Family, was a typically unsettling piece that had featured in the recent Venice Biennale. Quinlan had a hunch that the hyper-real, transgenic creature surrounded by a litter of babies would be a hit with gallery visitors, despite its confronting subject matter.

Her hunch proved correct - the work, almost always on display but frequently lent out to other institutions, is one of the gallery's most popular. But back then, Quinlan couldn't really have known what was to come.

Just like she couldn't have known that today, 16 years down the track, she would find herself heading up one of the country's significant public institutions.

She took the helm of the National Portrait Gallery in December, just months before the gallery was due to close, controversially, for six months to undergo significant repairs to the much-lauded 10-year-old building.

It's a building she barely got to know, let alone the institution's collection of around 3000 works. The thousands of portrait in all their various forms are now packed away; Quinlan and her staff are camping out in temporary space at Old Parliament House - ironically the gallery's first home, 20 years ago, before it moved into the purpose-built edifice down the road.

Consequently, for the first time since the building opened, the gallery is in a forced hiatus - off the radar and in a period of reflection. But it's also fitting that Quinlan is choosing to outline her vision for the gallery for its third decade, in the Andrew Sayers Memorial Lecture next week.

If there's one person she wishes she could speak to about this, as she prepares her speech, it's Andrew Sayers himself. The gallery's founder died in 2015, just two years after retiring from his role as director at the National Museum of Australia, across the lake. But his true legacy lay with the portraits, and with his long-term - and lovingly realised - vision for something beyond just a centre for biography and history.

"It's really a huge responsibility to pick up from where it is, at the moment," Quinlan says. "Not because I don't know what I'm doing, or there isn't the history to read about it - I would be really interested to know what [Andrew's] thoughts were on the third decade, because it's such a young institution."

Back in Bendigo, Quinlan had an overriding mission, right from her early years as director, to put the gallery - and the tiny city of 110,000 people - on the map. The institution was already more than 100 years old by then, but the world didn't know about Bendigo.

By the time she left, 18 years later, she was regularly being offered international exhibitions; the latest show, Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits, features works from the National Portrait Gallery in London.

"We had three building redevelopments during that time, the collection grew, I had introduced international exhibitions into the program and really firmly established them, and worked with the permanent collection, which is about 5000 works," she says.

Tudors to Windors was the last thing she worked on, and left before it was finally delivered to a public already keen to lap up ever more royal material, thanks to the enduring popularity of the monarchy, recent royal weddings and the huge success of Netflix drama The Crown.

So now, fetching up here in Canberra (incidentally the hometown of Piccinini herself), where is she to begin? Canberra, with its own peculiar history is, after all, is already well and truly on the map, and the gallery's popularity has stayed strong since its opening days.

One of the first things she'll be doing, once the gallery is up and running again, is introducing an awards season, with all three major prizes - the Digital Portrait Prize, the National Photographic Portrait Prize and the inaugural $75,000 Darling Prize for painting - running concurrently in autumn.

"I've put them all together, because I think that's a better way of seeing them," she says.

Before that, though, the gallery will open with a glitzy exhibition in October celebrating 60 years of Australian Vogue, setting the tone for high art and high appeal as the city heads into summer. The permanent collection will also be carefully rehung, and although there's talk of "bringing out all the old favourites", it's difficult to say just what these might be. For an institution with such a broad appeal, the favourites run the gamut from beloved celebrity portraits like Heath Ledger and Deborah Mailman, to one of the recently departed former prime minister Bob Hawke, or more intriguing new commissions.

"I think that really, people love and admire historical works but they also like to see the contemporary and the digital, so we'll make sure that we bring out the best of what we have, keeping in mind that it's not everything, as usual, it's just a percentage of what the holdings are," Quinlan says.

She's also excited, she says, by the prospect of commissioning bold new portraits of living subjects. It's new territory, covered only by two other Australian institutions, the Australian War Memorial and the Parliamentary Collection.

"I'm working on my very first commission right now - I can't tell you who it is...but it's really stressful," she says. "I can compare it to the whole concept of putting two people together, almost like a dating app if you like. They've got to connect and you've got to find the right match. It's been a bit like that and I've felt that way."

"This is something different because in Bendigo I didn't have to do this. [O]ur remit is very strong in this space and it's new to me."

But, back to the vision which, in many ways, is unchanged from when Andrew Sayers was busy establishing the collection back in the 1990s.

"I think we're more than a photo album, we're very much about Australian identity," she says. "You could flick through an album and say, 'That looks like Australia', but we're ever-changing... We're a visual language and interpretation of what Australia is. I can see it being a much bigger collection in the future. Collections are endless, really, when you think about it. That's why buildings keep growing around them, because they have to accommodate them.

"You never stop collecting unless you run out of money, and if you run out of money, that means you're not supported and that means you're not doing your job properly."