2024–Present — Transformation

In February 2024, I moved into a new studio at 106 Art - Studios and Gallery in St Kilda. Being surrounded by visual artists felt natural to me, allowing me to feel at ease among people who shared a creative way of seeing the world. I continued exploring the fluidity of inks and the ways different materials could interact. Quite quickly, another studio became available, twice the size, giving me the space to bring out the hundreds of ink works I had created and filed in folders over the years. I had also been contemplating creating a website for some time, wanting to capture my artistic journey and the evolution of my creative process. As I began preparing to have my work photographed for the website, I found myself looking at these ink works in a new way, noticing connections between individual works and discovering possibilities in how they might sit alongside one another. Each work carried its own history, yet when brought together, the works began to create something entirely new. Unexpected relationships emerged, and the meaning of an individual work could shift when seen as part of a larger composition. I started to recognise stories emerging between the images, where individual works connected to form a new narrative. It was these emerging narratives that drew me to bring different works together, allowing them to become part of something larger than they had been on their own. What began as a way to capture my artistic journey and process gradually opened up a new way of creating.

As the process of bringing my ink works together gradually began to settle into the background, I felt a growing urge to create again, not just by forming new narratives from existing works, but by physically painting with a brush. I wanted to bring the fluidity I had discovered through inks together with the physical presence of paint and the directness of the brush. This led me back to painting and the beginning of a new body of work, the circle series, which began with The Hold, The Fold and The Parting. Initially, I continued exploring the possibilities of ink while introducing acrylic and the circle as a new form within my work. This evolved into working with oil paint, applying it thickly with a very stiff brush and deliberately leaving the brushstrokes visible, sometimes exaggerating them, before pouring ink onto the wet paint and watching it follow the ridges, travel along the marks or dry and crack across the surface. I love the element of surprise in this process, never quite knowing what will happen when the materials meet or what unexpected forms might emerge through experimentation. The materials respond to one another in ways I can influence but never entirely control, and it is often these unpredictable interactions that create the most beautiful and intriguing results. The mountain motif that had travelled through so much of my earlier work began to reappear, but now it was emerging through layers, movement and broken surfaces. The process was becoming less about constructing an image and more about allowing something to emerge, with the materials revealing possibilities I could not have planned.

The circle gradually became central to this new body of work. For me, it speaks of coming full circle, not as a return to where I began, but as an accumulation of everything experienced along the way. It holds the cycles of life, death and rebirth, the layers of experience that shape us and the possibility of transforming what we carry into something new. In The Hold, accumulated experiences are held within the red globe, while The Fold and The Parting explore different aspects of separation, movement and change. The circle can contain, connect and transform, bringing the individual and the whole into relationship. This connection between the small and the vast also appears in works such as Matrix Unravelling, where the imagery evokes something microscopic, a fragment of a much larger world. In my more recent circular works, the fractured surfaces, crumbling forms and mountain-like structures reflect the continual breaking apart of established belief systems. I find myself drawn to the sense of time crumbling, life mirroring itself and layers of reality extending beyond our understanding. The imagery seems to hold both the breaking apart and what might emerge from it, the uncertainty of letting go alongside the possibility of something new.

Looking back across this journey, I can see how much has changed, not only in the materials I use but in my relationship with myself and the act of creating. For much of my earlier practice, I concealed my brush marks and tried to correct imperfections, wanting the finished work to appear perfect. Now I not only allow the marks, cracks and irregularities to remain, but celebrate the beauty and uniqueness they bring to each work. What might once have seemed like an imperfection has become an essential part of the work's character, revealing something honest and unguarded. This shift in my process reflects something much deeper within me, a growing acceptance of myself as I am, and a willingness to be vulnerable, to be seen without needing to conceal the parts that once felt imperfect and broken. The breaking and cracking in the work echo the loosening of beliefs I have carried, creating space both within my mind and within the imagery itself. I don't always understand what a work is expressing while I am making it. Often, I feel something through the process long before I can find the words for it. The materials, the marks and the imagery become a way of bringing my inner state into view, allowing me to recognise and understand something that was previously beyond conscious awareness. My practice continues to evolve, and I remain open to what might emerge next. The work is an ongoing conversation with myself, exploring transformation, vulnerability and acceptance, and the space that opens when I allow things to be as they are.