About me
In 2007 I completed
a Master of Fine Arts qualification through distance education from Monash
University. This culminated in an exhibition at Switchback Gallery, Monash
University in April 2007 and also included substantial written documentation.
My studies were completed over a four-year period whilst working in the Exhibitions
Branch of the National Library of Australia.
I graduated from Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hon) in Fine Art in 1997. Since 1985 I have exhibited in various group exhibitions both in Australia and overseas and have had various solo exhibitions. Photography plays an important role in my work – both as a means of informing my art practice as a painter and as an artwork in its own right.
My work over the past three years has been inspired not only by the Australian landscape but I have been fortunate enough to be in a position to spend time in 2004 at the Monash Centre in Italy, and Sardinia, and more recently I have travelled to California and New Mexico. I have found that travelling in the landscape – particularly such diverse areas as these, simply overwhelming. And inspiring.
My work has a lot to do with human intervention in the landscape, never about an innocent untouched nature. The relationship of human inhabitants to the land seems always to be an opposing one, of antagonism and confrontation rather than harmony. Concepts of living with the land rather than conquering it are very limited. It seems to me that for artists it is always a vehicle, rarely an end in itself. Of course Aboriginal artists have, in my opinion more of an affinity to the landscape than most of us. They are ‘at one’ with it. White Australians don’t have the benefit of many centuries of living in one place, of developing a dreaming, an entire spirituality based on such a relationship to place.
I have recently embarked on a new body of work to be exhibited at ANCA gallery in Canberra in 2008. The exhibition Displacement will concentrate on exploring the notion of collecting in a material world and consumer society through paintings of still life.