Work

Paintings

My paintings have become an obsession with colour and detail. In contrast to my photography where I am curating and image with things outside of myself, my paintings are like an amalgum of everything I have inside me. All the ideas, the colours, the existential questions, the joy, the light, the details, the examinations, the layers, the connections - all at once trying to fit on a page. I am really interested in the quarks, the atoms, the molecules that we are all made up of, that the universe is made up of - as an evening out of everything and everyone. We are all made of the same things right? So why are we so horrible to each other and other living things? I think the world is so amazing, magical even - and it's all around us, in everything. And so my paintings seem to have become about trying to organise the details and the layers and the patterns in a way that is both overwhelming in it's complexity but appealing in it's totality. The way they capture and reflect the light to me should spark some feelings of joy. I love being overwhelmed by detail. I find it kind of relaxing and I just like exploring the information visually. I don't know how fully to explain it, but to me these are how I see the world, look at the world, feel the world. Complex, chaotic, beautiful, ugly, and joyful all at the same time. But to be honest, my work has come out of the existential questions that come with loss, having lost my mother at a young age. I feel as though she equipped me to see the beauty in life even in loss and decomposition, that has sustained me, propelled me to explore and question and celebrate existence. What happens to us. How do we decompose and recompose? Are we made up of Quarks, molecules, atoms, from all matter of things? Stars, snails, poo, moon dust? I love just to paint, maybe pic a palette of colour and just see what turns up on the page, out of my brain and down through my arm. I like to have no plan, following the paint on an adventure. I love the problem solving of painting, looking at the shape and the colours and creating relationships on the canvas, small universes in a bigger picture. I love to imagine travelling through the layers of the world from the Universe to the microscopic and shifting my perspective on a moment to moment basis. Contemplating my existence relative to the big and the small.

Photography

I bought my first camera when I was living in Tokyo back in the late 90's. I took myself to Akihabara and bought this camera that took stills and video. I took it everywhere with me and even had one of the climbing chalk bags on a hook on my pants to carry it in like a holster. I took thousands of images none of great quality, but I had my first exhibition of pixelated images at the Design Festa Gallery in Harajuku back in maybe 2003. It was about light, of course, because that's what photography is all about. But I spent years after that taking photos, walking the streets all over the world and all over Australia -  just taking thousands of images. And I had from the get go a particluar kind of simplicity in my composition that I can't seem to get away from - in contrast to my paintings. It's always about creating that magical balance that is intuitively correct. I love organic lines, and patterns, and glimmering light. I'm obsessed with macro images that just take you into the details and layers of a thing. Like the layers of the universe. I don't take as many pictures as I used to because you just have too many to even look at. But I love capturing just a small little piece of the beauty I see in the world and sharing it where I can.