My oil paintings, light installations and spectrogram collages are portals into other worlds: worlds where reality and imagination are interchangeable. I ‘feel’ as a way of thinking, using my primary experience of the natural world as a guide. While my artworks are landscape-based, they invite non-literal interpretations about light, colour and energy in the landscape. They point to the wildness and primal nature in humankind. My current investigation explores the forces that bind humanity into an intimate reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world.
Living and working on Garigal and Gayamaygal land, Eora Nation, Sydney, Australia
Painting
My painting practice draws upon 15th Century European oil painting techniques. Loomstate linen canvases are stretched, sized and primed with gesso. The paintings are made, as much as possible, with pure pigments, linseed oil and solvent (no mediums). My paintings are landscape-based, however, rather than the literal depictions of a scene, motifs of waves, clouds and rocks float through space, challenging historical representation of the landscape by presenting familiar motifs in curious ways.
Video & Light Work
Observations of light and atmosphere are central to my creative process, Light is a motif, a metaphor and a medium within my practice. Colour and light are forms of energy and, as such, are direct and animated mediums to express the vital forces of the landscape. Working with light and video is a natural extension of my painting practice: however, light is more unruly than paint - it spills everywhere! As St. Francis Of Assisi wrote, “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.”
Spectrogram Collage
Soundscape explores exchanges between the hearer and the heard: expressing sound as visual forms that articulate my situated, embodied experience in the landscape. My body is augmented by a spectrometer device that converts sound into a time-frequency diagram known as a waterfall diagram. The artworks are composed via digital collage, layering spectrogram data from different days across the seasons to form compositions that encapsulate cycles of time and events in particular locations in the landscape. Neither abstract nor representational, the sound forms act as landscape motifs in the compositions. A representational landscape narrative emerges in each composition, partly by chance, partly due to aesthetic choices that reference painting conventions such as atmospheric perspective, horizon line and colour fields.