I see Mount Barrow every day from a distance. Experiencing it up close was something else. Standing at this altitude, made of sky and stone, I felt removed from the world I know. Tasmania’s alpine highlands become uncanny, familiar yet strange, caught between geological forces and dissolving conditions.

I paint this ancient landscape, resistant to certainty, in gestural marks. Millions of years compressed into rock and weather, grasped through feeling. Against this painted atmosphere, utilitarian structures punctuate the terrain, stark and functional, part of the summit’s infrastructure that connects northeast Tasmania to the world. Paradoxically, standing beneath the towers that link thousands of people, I feel profoundly isolated. Technology built for connection deepens my solitude on this age-old summit.

Where traditions in painting might seek comfort or the sublime, here I’m drawn to disquiet. Vulnerability works in two ways. I feel exposed to forces beyond my control, geological and atmospheric, vast. However, the landscape is equally vulnerable to us, to change, our marks, to infrastructure that seems permanent yet may itself become obsolete.

When experiencing this landscape up close rather than from a distance, what endures is mutual fragility, human and landscape, both temporary, both exposed.