I am an
Australian artist living and working in Paris, France. I completed my
Bachelor of Fine Arts with the National Art School, Sydney.
At the graduation show I was awarded a residency with Queen Street
Studios, where I worked for 5 months and finished with a
solo show in their exhibition space. I now live in France, and
have had several solo and group exhibitions in both France and
Australia.
The
majority of my artistic practice is painting. I paint in oils on
canvas or board and watercolour sketches on paper. I am also a performance artist and have created several performance pieces with my co-collaborator Alina Noir. On occasions I
also include drawing and sculpture in my practice. What I love about
painting is the physicality of the colours, the movement of the
brush, it is like a dance.
The
ocean holds specific symbolism in my work. I paint the international
waters that my family crossed to reach Australia, I paint the beaches
I grew up on that feel like home, I paint the seas of my Irish,
English and Welsh ancestors who all lived in coastal villages. I
paint the oceans I crossed when I moved to France, and the oceans
that now separate me from my birth place and family. I paint the
abstract memories and stories that connect these places. I paint
myself as the sea, I paint the water that flows between these lands
and the water inside us all.
My
work is an exploration into how we define the 'self' in relation to
the concept of home. Looking at the interaction between the idea of
self and the concept of home by drawing on the influences that
ancestry, environment and belonging have on the self and its
surrounding space. The concepts of Self and home not only interact
with one another but also help build and define each other.
The
diaspora of my ancestors has
given me a sense of ambivalence, which can be expressed through a
term that the Welsh call Hiraeth, “a homesickness
or the pining for a home, a person, a figure, even a national history
that may never have actually existed. To feel hiraeth
is to experience a deep sense of incompleteness tinged with longing.”
(Smith College: Kahn Liberal Arts Institute) These inquiries into
cultural heritage and 'home' land have become particularly important
to my work during the past few years, firstly, when the environmental
disaster at the end of 2019, and into 2020, saw fires spread across
much of Australia burning so much of the land where I was born and
grew up. Then, when travel restrictions were put in place due to
covid 19, causing me to be cut off from my birth place and family.
I
am also researching this subject of self and home, with a focus on
how the self can be defined in terms of cultural identity and the
history of ones homeland. Being a white Australian the concept of
home becomes more complex when looked at through the lens of
postcolonial theory. I was born, and grew up in Australia (on
Ngunnawal,
Yuin and Gadigal
country).
My mothers family immigrated to Australia from England in the early
60's, and my father's family have been in Australia for 5
generations. Australia is my birth place and where I grew up, however
living on land that was stolen from the first nations people has
never felt comfortable. As with many other Australians, my
country's history leaves me with a complicated and ambivalent sense
of home. Australia, like so many other countries, has a colonial
past, and there is a continual reckoning with that history.
It
is researching these subjects that leads me to the ocean, to
international waters, where boundaries cross.
There
is a fluidity between the self and home, between one's ancestry and
the environment, and it becomes difficult to separate the self as a
single entity. One is what they take in. One is a part of what
surrounds them. We share the air we breath and the water we drink. We
swap ideas. Like ripples or waves in water, we are one formless giant
moving thing. We are ephemeral and eternal.
