The beauty and intricacy of the natural world has fascinated me for as long as I can remember and has stimulated and inspired all my journeys in art and life. Whether barefoot in the high Himalaya or alone on a small boat in the wide Pacific I’ve always turned to art for solace. The studio is my home, I have no other. The cave, the forest, the Valley of Winds, the inner city loft, the mahogany cabin of a wave tossed ketch, the garden chalet at my mothers house in Berrima – these are the many and varied workshops of a restless, reckless soul.
I studied painting, film and photography at a cutting edge art school in Sydney, and more recently completed a Master of Creative Arts Degree at the University of Wollongong. I have had three solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows. Founded in modernist traditions my practice touches upon rites of desert aboriginal body painting, Indian celebratory ritual and medieval divinity adornment.
Works are constructed on site during lengthy sessions of immersion in the process of painting and ‘the happening of place’. The exploration of my chosen natural sites using abstracted shapes, symbolic colours and black/white evokes a strong sense of both actual and mythological place. The inscrutable architecture of Nature, arranged in leaf, rock, sky and cloud forms a numinous ground for embedded glyphs - a language of signs and signals intuited during the spontaneous act of painting which to me is a kind of conscious dreaming.
My wide multi-panel friezes are visual narratives tracing passages in cyclic time and space. If these works, which are essentially expressions of gratitude, help engender a sense or feeling for the value of unspoiled nature, or rekindle the memory of a personal moment of true awe and wonder, or open the eyes to the existence of an unremembered numinous reality they will have served a useful purpose.
