The wind unlocked my door

My practice considers the triangular relationship between landscape, inner experience, and painting. By travelling to a particular place, working on site, and then developing the work in my studio space back home, a tension is created as I distance and then attempt to re-connect across that distance. Visually, my paintings represent scenes that hover between observed and imaginary, and this friction between the landscape and my creative projection onto it, in many ways becomes the subject of the work.

This particular painting has its roots in a period in early 2021 during which I travelled anti-clockwise around the State of Tasmania in a van with my partner. Intuitively drawn to the rugged high planes of Cradle Mountain-Lake Sinclair National Park, I was captured by the wind-bent foliage, the textured curves of the landscape, and the harshness of the air currents. Seeds of potential visual works began to take form during this meeting of inner and outer, and the work presented here is a single manifestation of this ongoing creative project.