This body of work marks a major departure from my practice of the last several years. This is made manifest in both subject matter and process. By chance, really, my subject has become the act of painting itself—an obsessive interrogation of paint as structure and colour. What’s more, these paintings were destroyed as much, if not more, than they were created: erased, wiped, attacked with any and every implement close at hand in the studio, until they settled into themselves, like dust settles on a sunlit floor. 

Language has always played an important role in the work, but this show in particular offers up titles that have a euphonic, allusive quality. They don’t, for example, refer to the subject at all. What they do is add a linguistic and literary frisson to the experience of viewing the painting, in the same way a fleck of an unexpected colour adds to the overall experience. 

Chance has also played a major role in the creation of these works: colours that shouldn’t work were liberally used and then over-painted with something to unify them; and then they were erased, smudged, broken by another canvas, or a rough cloth, or my own clothing.

This suite of paintings was made for a group show at Becker Minty as part of the Dark Mofo festival in 2023.

A select group of paintings from 2022.

Forget me not—a solo exhibition at Twenty Twenty Six Gallery in Sydney, July 2022.

My paintings express the memory of a feeling of being in the landscape—whether it’s Rushcutter’s Bay in a milky, April morning; the fields of fluorescent canola on Wiradjuri country; or the blue glow of gum trees blanketing the hills in Tasmania. Each painting expresses my feeling of immersion in the world, my isolation, my sense of integration and my identity.

The flowers act as another layer of meaning integrated with the landscapes. They, too, are painted from memory, and express the fugitive, the vulnerable, the rail against decay, the precious window of time we have before we return to the rain-soaked soil.

Since returning to Australia in July 2021, I’ve produced a new series of work responding to the abundant rains we have experienced. I have never witnessed such a blossoming of greenery and plantlife in what is normally an arid, dry part of the world. These select works are an expression of being in the world blurred by rain and bowed by winds.

The series marks a departure in painterly application and the dissolution of the figure/ground. While I think all my works are orientated with a horizon (however subtle), this series begins to explore painting that expands beyond the edges.

Here are some select works from my London studio in 2021. This was a period of great introspection, of pining for Australia and the great expanse of sky and land, of dramatic colours and operatic nature.

Here I’m beginning to grapple with the tension between painterly gesture and a less apparent, soaked application.

This suite of seven paintings was painted for CLEAN SLATE, a group show with Gruin Gallery in LA. The conceptual tenet of the show was a new beginning, starting afresh, so I went straight to the ocean for a starting point. The seven paintings follow the ocean’s progress throughout the day: from clear, bright mornings, to the more subdued hues of the gloaming, to a brilliant and bejewelled dusk.

My work has in the last six months undergone a radical shift – from high-finish representational painting to gestural abstraction, something I hadn’t done for ten years.

This new work, tentatively called ‘Saturn returns’, works toward expressing the memory of a feeling I have experienced in a particular place, whether it’s in the middle of the Australian bush, London Fields or Lake Como. The work charts my travels out of Australia, on a dead-end sojourn to New York City, and then finally to London, where I reckoned with my sense of placelessness, the seemingly impossible task of finding stability in Europe’s capital, and navigating my next move on the canvas. And then of course, Covid happened.

I work on unstretched canvas with acrylic paint in total silence: the process is quasi-meditative, and I build the image as I re-examine the remembered feeling.

HyperSigns has been my ongoing body of work that explores consumer imagery, art historical imagery and the notion of the mediated image. It began during my Master of Fine Art degree at the National Art School, and threads of it can be seen in every other aspect of my work.

The still life work is encompassed by the broader HyperSigns investigation, but here I’m looking at more superficial aspects of the genre: beauty and youth and seduction.

The Paris paintings are the manifestation of my reaction to the terrorist attacks throughout the City of Lights on November 13. The works present a series of tableaux that feature news imagery from Paris and the Beirut bombings of the same day. The subjects, supermodels, are all chosen from editorials found in Vogue Paris. Fruit, which has become something of a mainstay in my work, represents the visceral and the viscose: bullet wounds, exploded flesh, burst loins.

The anxiety of terrorism insinuates itself in the black and white backgrounds, while the women – strong, liberal and defiant personifications of a French psyche, play out their routine in glossy luxury.

Over the last ten years, I’ve painted a number of portraits that have been finalists in several prizes in Australia: the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the Kilgour Prize, the Archibald Prize Salon des Réfusés, and the BP Portrait Prize.

Every day I went down to St Kilda Beach and stared at the sky, and very quickly I became acutely aware of the massive shifts in the firmament: cold days would bring out brilliant, coral pink sunsets; rain would inspire a study in subtle grey hues; dry heat would give the world a fierce, amber cast. These landscapes are my response to my local environment. They also give me a structure to explore atmosphere through wet-in-wet painting.