‘Art allows me to create the world I want to belong to. Art is home and personal. It’s a place where I am free to exercise my power and test ideas, before releasing them into other worlds. At that point it accrues meanings beyond my control. That’s a good thing because art is a conversation.’
Photo: Lynne Eastaway
… An artwork is perhaps the very thing that is not urgent at all. It is slow and methodical and can be dormant and can hibernate and can hide and can smuggle meanings across time periods …
Helen Molesworth, Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast, Has Contemporary Art Lost Its edge? 5/12/2024
I am an Australian artist and independent researcher based in Mittagong, NSW. My underlying concern lies with the logics associated with marginalised narratives, particularly those of women, and how historically they come to be represented in or omitted from dominant dialogues and ‘isms’ within visual art discourses. I create images and spatial structures through traditional and expanded notions of painting and drawing, to explore ideas of place, identity and belonging, pushing my subject matter into queer, imaginative realms. Pink symbolically permeates through much of my work as an anomaly that falls outside tabulated colour systems, while occupying the internal apparatus of every body. Surrealism also holds a particular fascination because of its reliance on the ‘illogical unconscious’. I am interested in the contradictory delineation and intersection of nature and culture and how, as a species, we interpret, imitate, and manipulate nature to fulfill our needs and desires, as well as create meaning for ourselves. These concerns inevitably require consideration of the way we engage land, sea, and air as foundations for our societies, cultures and political systems, and the role acts of creation and destruction play in this process.
Completing a PhD, The Transplanted Bush, in 2008 I developed specific knowledges around gender, desire, and landscape, while lecturing and tutoring in painting and drawing at UNSW for fourteen years demanded broad and ongoing research across art history, contemporary practice, and theory.
I have exhibited and discussed my work in artist-run spaces, university spaces, regional galleries, state institutions and overseas forums. In 2013 I founded and directed AirSpace Projects with Brenda Factor – a five gallery and unconventional museum space in Sydney – where I curated exhibitions such as Landscaping and Grey Area, and ran the In Motion gallery and street festival. In 2018 I incorporated the space so that it could be donated to the community. We moved to Mittagong to focus on our art practices, part of which is to create a beautiful native habitat for the local wildlife.
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