What were some of your early creative influences?

There are many. At art school, I was influenced by Sigmar Polke, Max Beckmann, Philip Guston, Giorgio de Chirico, Jasper Johns, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jon Cattapan, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger and a lot of Neo-Expressionists from the Moritzplatz group in Berlin.

At the end of a trip through Europe and the USA when I was 21, I chanced upon an Ed Ruscha retrospective at MOCA LA that had a profound impact on me. His cool pop imagery and conceptual use of materials in relation to his suburban subject matter changed the way I thought about my work and how I wanted to position it. Ed cooled down my whole approach. It became more personal and pre-planned and gave me licence to focus on the suburban environment that I grew up in. This led to an enduring obsession with architecture, the built environment, and its relationship to nature.

Soon after, I began to look more closely at John Brack, Robert Rooney and Howard Arkley. They challenged the myths underpinning Australian landscape painting and positioned the suburbs as an authentic reflection of how most Australians live, which provided me with a local context for what I was doing.

Some of these artists still inform what I do to various degrees, but now my taste is much broader, and I look beyond painting for inspiration.

What initially drew you to painting and how have you developed your practice?

I didn’t get into painting until my teens. After a lacklustre VCE art experience, I spent a year studying painting at Box Hill TAFE under Stephen Wickham. He encouraged me to ditch acrylic and use oil paint. I loved the intensity of colour, its juicy slipperiness, longer drying times to manipulate the paint, all the different mediums, the smell and grand history of it; I was immediately hooked!

I have returned to themes, particularly those related to architecture and the built environment, and the impact of technology. Inevitably I have tendencies and habits I try (and fail) to break, but style is not a driving motivation and I don’t want to be pinned down by it. I tend to use colour with a high-key crispness, and I’m drawn to combinations that look synthetic or unnatural. There are recurring compositional dynamics; scenes that indicate habitation but feel dystopian and tend to have a digital accent. My approaches and techniques have varied with the feel of the subject matter.

My work has gotten close to abstraction at times and moves between hard-edged flattened approaches and more fluid or blurred ones to articulate space. Techniques and methods encompass conventional acrylic and oil painting, a lot of collage and digital work, photography, printmaking and, lately, experiments with AI and video.

What have been some of your favourite career experiences?

International exhibitions and studio residencies stand out. I was fortunate to be able to live and work in New York and Los Angeles during the height of a new boom in painting in the 2000s. Things seemed to line up. I met and showed with interesting artists, some that I’d been interested in for a while, so to be able to develop my work and exhibition profile among all that energy was significant. It was an art school dream that came true.

More recently, I was in residence at the Leipzig International Art Program in Germany, which was similarly energising at a time when I was shifting the direction of my work and I was in a few shows there. Leipzig has a tight community of artists, an interesting music scene and is close to other cultural centres such as Berlin, Chemnitz and Dresden. It also has a unique cultural history and is littered with ruins from the GDR era. I still think about it.

This year I spent a hot month in Eastern Europe visiting Socialist Modern architectural ruins and ‘spomeniks’ in Romania, Serbia and Croatia. Apart from blowing my mind, this field trip was extremely productive. I was able to develop a substantial photographic and video archive that will serve as reference material for future paintings, prints and video work for quite some time. I’m really excited about this!

Winning the Gold Coast Art Prize with a small but confrontational Head Case Study portrait was stunning. I thought I had a slim chance of getting in and snowflake’s chance in hell of winning, it was hard to believe!

Could you tell us about the artworks featured in Painting Now?

Exponential Horizon is an AI-enhanced digital video, made in collaboration with my artist friend Brie Trenerry. It was projected inside an old disused bank in Prahran as part of an exhibition called DAS KAPITAL in late 2023. High-resolution documentation of about ten recent paintings of mine was fed into a generative AI program for moving images, which produced numerous short clips. The clips were directed by written prompts extracted from my PhD and Brie’s wild prompt interventions. The idea was to confuse the program to encourage ‘data hallucinations’, an idea I found extremely appealing.

Screen grabs from Exponential Horizon and clips that didn’t make the final edit were cut and collaged in Photoshop to create new compositions. The Afterlife of Things and Persistent Illusions are paintings that evolved from this process of mediation between analogue and digital modes. Both are based on distortions of paintings featuring discarded mattresses in states of decay that were collaged into images I took of an abandoned school near where I grew up in Melbourne. Now they’ve ended up being AI-assisted mash-up paintings that speculate about future ruins.

Capriccio Study 1 and Capriccio Study 2 are based on digital collages of fragments taken from ruin paintings by famous 18th-century exponents of the genre. I decided to paint them in fluorescent acrylic to dislodge them from their historical origin, reposition them as building sites, and symbolically reference hi-vis safety clothing warning of potential dangers.

Soft Core was based on a manipulated photo I took of a defiant-looking discarded mattress in New York after a blizzard. I liked the soft winter light falling on it added the rainbow label to make it look optimistic.

Is there a narrative running through your Painting Now series and how does this reflect the direction of your practice?

This group of works are ruin fantasies that have come out of my PhD research and jump around between past, present and future. Temporal mutability – the feeling of hovering in time – is present in the experience of ruins and part of their attraction. Ruins, decay and obsolescence are distinct aspects of my practice right now. As the PhD progresses, I’ll be experimenting with even more exaggerated temporal disjoint and formal distortion made possible with the assistance of new technology.

What initially drew you to painting and how have you developed your practice over time?

Painting has always felt like the most natural medium for me to explore the subtle intersections of emotion, form and narrative. Having previously painted figurative pieces of womanly bodies, I spent some years exploring minimalism with highly reductive, abstract compositions but had a yearning to return to the more overtly figurative so have now come full circle. What drew me to oil painting was its potential for layering – both visually and symbolically. I love the way oil paint can be applied in translucent layers, revealing an underpainting and building a quiet depth over time. This sensitivity to layering is now at the core of my practice, allowing me to create dimensionality with minimal paint. I work with a restrained palette, often limiting myself to just three colours and mixing a multitude of tones to underscore simplicity and balance.

I’ve found myself returning to certain themes that feel essential to my work: womanhood, intimacy and connection. These manifest through the depiction of female figures and draping fabrics, which I use as symbolic stand-ins for the body. The relationship between the figure and the fabric speaks to the fluidity of identity, intimacy and the ways women relate to each other. My experiences as a woman and mother have deepened these explorations as I view my subjects through a very personal lens.

I’m continually drawn back to the idea of working with minimal materials – sparse layers of paint, careful attention to the tone of the underpainting, and a focus on the softness of form. There is something about the restraint in my process that mirrors the emotional complexity I aim to capture. This approach has allowed me to develop a style that I hope feels both delicate and intentional.

What have been some of your favourite career experiences?

Those that have allowed me to connect with others in meaningful ways. Each of my exhibitions has been a unique milestone. To have my work resonate with viewers, especially women who have shared personal stories after seeing the pieces, has inspired me and spurred me on. Being able to create a space for those dialogues around the varied experiences of womanhood and hearing how my work can make others feel seen or understood has been both fulfilling and reaffirming.

I love collaborating with other creatives – whether in group exhibitions or collaborative projects. Seeing how my paintings may fit into a larger conversation and learning from other artists’ approaches and stories has expanded the way I view my practice. I most love the moments spent in my studio, where the quiet focus of creating allows me to fully immerse myself. It’s in these moments that I often find the most joy.

Could you tell us about the works featured in Painting Now? 

I’ve continued to explore how the female figure and fabric can express intimacy, identity and connection. My artworks capture my musings on my own life — the ordinariness and extraordinariness of the everyday experience. Fleeting moments that may seem mundane or insignificant but are imbued with intimacy and tenderness. I like to explore the complexities of human emotion and the universal longing for connection with others. I’m interested in the idea that human connections are non-linear – they flow freely, fluidly between people, transcending time and place, parallel to our own inner monologues.

One of the starting points for these pieces was the concept of touch – not just the physical act, but the emotional resonance it carries. As someone who has always been fascinated by the subtleties of relationships, I wanted to explore how touch can serve as both a bridge and a boundary between people. In these works, touch becomes a metaphor for human connection and the vulnerability it entails. I aimed to capture the fleeting nature of those moments – a hand brushing against skin or the tenderness of a body leaning into another. I hoped to reflect this in the softness of my painting technique by using delicate layers of paint and subtle shifts in tone.

The soft translucency of the fabric hints at the way emotions often lie just beneath the surface, waiting to be revealed. At times, the fabric becomes a veil, suggesting the ways we protect ourselves or keep parts of our inner lives hidden from others.

The experience of motherhood and my relationships as a woman have deeply influenced this exploration. How love can be nurturing, protective and tender, yet filled with raw complexity. Each piece in this collection is an attempt to explore those nuances, drawing the viewer into a quiet, intimate space where the figure and fabric become symbols of the unseen emotions that shape our relationships.

How do these ideas or narratives reflect the direction of your practice?

I found myself returning to the idea of connectedness. This narrative is very much reflective of where my painting practice is at right now. I’ve been increasingly interested in how to distil emotion and narrative into subtle gestures – whether through the choice of colour, the layering of translucent paint or the interplay between the figure and the fabric. My process has become more focused on simplicity and restraint, which I believe allows the emotional depth of the work to emerge more fully. I find that by limiting myself to a sparse colour palette and minimal use of paint, I’m able to concentrate on the nuances of form and feeling. This focus on the push and pull of human connection is something that runs through the entire collection.

As I continue to explore these themes, I’m interested in delving even deeper into the tension between connection and isolation or the concealing and revealing of ourselves to one another. The Painting Now series feels like a natural progression as I continue to refine my focus on the quiet complexities of human relationships, especially through the lens of my own experiences as a (queer) woman, mother, partner and artist.