From Mills Plains

My work often begins with existing images – here, John Glover’s ‘A corroboree of natives in Mills Plains’ – but enters them obliquely. Fragments are lifted, shifted, and set into motion through pattern, geometry, and the slow accumulation of marks. Abstraction becomes a way of loosening the structure of a landscape image, allowing new rhythms and alignments to emerge. I follow the pull of colour, the interplay between organic forms and constructed shapes, and the generative possibilities of repetition and rupture. Meaning is not predetermined; it develops through the process, shaped by the image’s drift. As the painting evolves, the contours of the landscape appear and recede, sometimes clear, sometimes only a trace. The result is a surface where histories echo without settling, where the landscape genre is held but gently transformed. The work resists a single reading, inviting viewers to sense how images shift when they migrate, fracture, and re-form. In this way, the painting echoes my experience of being a migrant in the Tasmanian landscape – alive to deep time, continual change, the long human presence that has shaped it, and the quiet uncertainty of what is still forming.