Recipient of the Reflektor Prize.
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Originally from the traditional unceded lands of the Kaurna people on what is now known as the Adelaide Plains, I moved to Naarm/Melbourne, where my current creative work has generally developed into an expanded practice. My current project emerged out of a deep sense of anxiety in terms of how to approach painting as a practice and how to think about painting. In this, I became more interested in the ‘everyday’, living and being and working through various methods. Through my experiences of creating work at home over the past few years and recognising my creative practices as a type of unpaid labour, I have been drawn to work with ceramics, naturally dyed repurposed fabrics and oil paintings.
The resulting works reside within a general insecurity about painting and what this might or could be. As a result, I moved away from direct painting, where the painter is ‘author’, devising a process of creating transferals of paint from one surface to another, where the material of paint seeps through one material and is transferred to underlying sheets of calico. The backs of these stained sheets of calico are what is shown. Through this, the preciousness of a painting and the artist’s hand is absent and materiality shifts to the forefront. The transferals that were made because of these backings are outside of notions of ‘original painting’, and this affords the opportunity for both myself and the viewer to sense beauty without control; momentary happenings and occurrences.
Through this material exploration, I ask the viewer to sit within the mundane and fleeting experience of life, whether it be cooking for those whom one lives with, hanging out washing, walking, or creating at home or the studio. The more potent internal experiences of love and grief seep their way into the work as they are inexplicably linked to our experience of the everyday.
