What were some of your early influences and how do they continue to inform your practice?

One of the artists who has influenced me since the very start of my career is Odilon Redon. The intuitive nature of his approach and his acceptance of the accidental and the indeterminate are all aspects of his practice that are echoed within my own. 

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

I simply love the act of painting – and with it, to create. I often start a painting loosely without a predetermined concept. It is interesting that it doesn’t matter where I start, I inevitably stumble on some unified themes, such as the circus or imaginative creatures, which may relate to my subconscious mind. 

What have been some of your favourite career experiences?

Being a finalist in last year’s National Emerging Art Prize. This program provided me with valuable opportunities to showcase my work and allowed me to push my creative boundaries to new extents.

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

When I begin to work on my paintings, I choose a colour palette, and from there, I build up my ideas throughout the process. This group of works reflect, most of all, the subjects of my subconscious mind: memories from the past, impressions of old myths, an unfinished story or a forgotten lyric.

Is there a narrative or throughline in your Painting Now series? Does this reflect the direction of your practice at the moment?

I think my paintings aren’t restricted to a defined narrative. For me, narrative is a blurred and unintentional reflection of my subconscious. They are ambiguous and open-ended. With an imaginative side of perception, the works can be interpreted differently for each viewer.

What were some of your early influences and how do these continue to inform your practice?

This is something I think about a lot. There’s almost this internal catalogue of things I’ve returned to for as long as I can remember that really strike a chord. I don’t necessarily think there’s a thematic or genre thread, but the common factor is that I just have this emotional reaction. Some go way back to childhood. In no specific order: The land art of Andy Goldsworthy – in particular, one image of layered yellow leaves across a damp branch that almost forms a square of yellow. The kinetic sculptures of Len Lye – hands down my earliest memory of being emotionally moved by art in a way I couldn’t really even figure out why. I’m calling it was 1985 and my Grandfather took me to an exhibition of Len’s in Wellington. Dansaekhwa – there’s something in the simplicity of a one-colour painting that punches me in the gut in ways I can’t articulate. A ‘successful work’ is kinda bullshit to try to quantify, but I’m incredibly proud of the simplicity in my practice. This sounds so lofty, but there’s something like ‘writing a poem with one word’ that I adore.

A few years ago, I read The Andy Warhol Diaries and I’m now pretty much a super fan. His view on the world back then seems so relevant now (especially pop culture, of which I am a big consumer). I read online a quote the other day that was along the lines of “if Andy were alive today, he would love TikTok”. Another layer of his work that keeps informing my practice is the repetition. Quite simply, I find it so calming and also really aesthetically pleasing, this idea of the same thing over and over again. All the work I have in Painting Now is anchored in this idea of repeating 50 x 20-centimetre rectangles and then manipulating and arranging them. It’s the same thing over and over again; each one completely unique but also exactly the same.

Jean DuBuffet – in particular, the monochrome works anchored in a black outline of 3D shapes. Ram Dass – I listen to an awful lot of Ram Dass in the studio. I know this is quite a reach, but I can absolutely go down an internal rabbit hole thinking about how the flags are all the same at their inception and, depending on how I manipulate them, no two are exactly the same. Kind of how we are all born basically the same, and then depending on how life manipulates us we all turn out different on a micro level, but stay the same on a macro level. No two flags are the same even though they look it; no two fingerprints are the same, even though they look it.

I am well aware that the Ram Dass ‘essence of existence’ is probably irrelevant to most people and only makes sense in my head. On the flip side, I really think that no matter what I say about the work, people look at it and they like it or they don’t. Someone is going to put it on their wall because it looks nice, and if that’s as far as they get with it, then that’s brilliant. I adore this Etel Adnan monologue for those reasons. I can give inspiration until the cows come home, but am I just post-rationalising to sound smart? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, I think my work has real beauty and it shouldn’t feel taboo to say I’m motivated by that.

What initially drew you to your medium?

I love how honest it is. In a really crude sense, clay is dirt and water, and that absolute raw simplicity as a starting point excites me so much. It’s tactile, and there’s a pace to things I adore too. You can’t rush ceramic – I can make as much work as I can make in a day, but that’s just this starting point, and there’s then this period of a couple of weeks as things dry and are fired, then fired again, et cetera, et cetera. Purely due to the laws of physics (how clay dries, et cetera), you can’t rush or force those steps.

What have been some of your favourite career experiences?

I was invited to be part of a group show at India Mahdavi’s project space in Paris earlier this year. I’m really proud of the work I showed, but also that I was returning to Paris (I lived there for seven years or so until 2019) for the first time as an artist. It really felt like a moment in the early stages of this new chapter (I began my practice in 2020, so it wasn’t at all part of my life when I was in Paris before). I had my third solo show at C. Gallery in Melbourne in July and I bloody loved it. You’ll roll your eyes at this, but I’m so pumped to be part of Painting Now and am going to list that, too!

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

From the get-go, I wanted to present a body of work that all anchored in the exact same thing – the 20 x 50-centimetre rectangle that is then manipulated and arranged in different clusters. I see these individually as sculptures of brush strokes, and then they are arranged into paintings or sculptures of paintings. I was super clear in my head that I wanted to use the areas of unglazed raku as a negative space play and that the materiality laid on top would be purely white or purely gold. I find there’s a real Jekyll and Hyde/Yin-Yang to this – the white is so clean and calm, and the gold is camp and brash and loud. I think so many of the ideas and initial inspiration come from that sort of internal catalogue of artistic influences I listed earlier.

Is there a throughline in your Painting Now series and how does this reflect the direction of your practice?

The throughline is absolutely the restraint and limited elements (a flag, white or gold) that make up each of the finished works. For me, this isn’t reductive or even minimalist, it’s more that I can distil so many references and ideas and things I want to explore and come out with something really simple that doesn’t feel like it lacks depth. This represents a body of work I really want to show at this moment. I could honestly see myself sitting here in 20 years and still just banging on about how I like to make ceramic flags all uniform in scale and come up with different ways to lay them out over and over and over again. I was saying to a friend the other day that I don’t have an end goal specifically, I just want to keep going, and that feels amazing. He turned around and said, “That’s why it’s called a practice. You’re not looking to clock the game, you’re just happy endlessly practising.”

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

I think there’s just a textural, material frequency to painting that I always wanted to get close to. It’s one of the languages that feels most comfortable for me to use – even when I make other things, there nearly always seems to be a reason to think and feel through painting.

I love how slow oil paint is (even though I speed mine up a lot by decreasing its drying time). There’s so much room for making adjustments and changes before arriving at a finished painting. You can look for an image without knowing it ahead of encountering it.

Probably all my paintings respond to a single central theme but I have trouble saying what it is. It’s existential and easier for me to paint about than talk about. One important thing is just about painting as a language and the bodies on either side of an exchange that might happen through it.

What have been some of your favourite career experiences?

Participating in the DESA residency in Ubud, Bali, earlier this year was an amazing experience! It was my first residency so I didn’t have any solid expectations. It was beautiful and intense to have the luxury of so much open and focused time and then to get totally distracted. I think I’m still metabolising my experiences of that time and that’s exciting because it fuels further work. I don’t necessarily even know what that is yet. I enjoyed connecting with other artists there so much. Moments of connection or affinity with others are so sustaining in the course of a career or a stretch of life.

Every opportunity to engage with others in a space that is deeply meaningful for all present but doesn’t necessarily feel valuable in the wider world some days is always a great experience. So any contexts for those exchanges are my favourite career experiences. And the enduring relationships that are borne out of these are so important and so fun!

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

I began where I always begin – with a group of reference images that I feel compelled to translate by painting. Some had been hanging around in the wings for a long time (to the point that I can no longer remember their source) and others popped up after the series had begun, inserting themselves into the logic of the group.

Some are screenshots from the Czech film Malá mořská víla (The Little Mermaid), 1976. All the paintings correspond to different screenshots and other found photographic images from magazines, memes, et cetera.

One morning out of nowhere, I realised they were paintings of people who wanted to touch something. I wonder if they’re uncomfortable but at the same time humorous in a way that alleviates the discomfort. (Although perhaps you would have to share my exact sense of humour – I’m never sure.) I think they’re uncomfortable because they hold a sense of ambivalence. Making these works, I thought a lot about ambivalence in desire and fantasy, and I never arrived at a concrete idea of what anyone wanted to touch. I wouldn’t say they’re related to my own experience but I do believe in a somatic relationship to any work I’m making.

What were some of your early influences and how do they continue to inform your practice?

First and foremost, the Beatles were my earliest artistic influence. Painting-wise, the war paintings of Ivor Hele used to feature in the WWII magazines my brother collected. As a child, the energy and the atmosphere of these pictures excited me. I consider Hele to be Australia’s Goya. I also had a great love of cavalry charge paintings, the charge of the Scott’s Greys being one of my favourites. The amount of skill needed to execute these pictures still amazes me.

What initially drew you to painting?

I never wanted to be a painter, it was never on my radar. I did not understand that painting could be a language the way I understood music to be. I went to The National Art School to meet musicians and get a band together, which I did. The band broke up eventually; by then, I had finished art school and I did not know what else to do but give painting a try. Before I went to art school I had worked at a high-end framer as an ornamentor, gilder and frame restorer. We used to get many great old paintings in, and having a chance to physically handle them gave me a good insight into painting.

What have been some of your favourite career experiences?

Winning the Sulman was a good one. I was at my wits end at the time, having spent five years working on an extremely difficult body of work that no gallery was interested in. One always seems to be on the razor’s edge of not knowing whether one is inspired or deluded. Faith and belief are always of utmost importance for me. I was running out of energy, faith in myself, and money. I wondered if I was nothing but a fool to continue a practice that felt like it was destroying me. I did not give up, however, and one of the paintings from that body of work won the prize.

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

Dad used to trade with the Japanese POWs during the war. We always had Japanese things around the house. He made several visits there after the war. The Japanese aesthetic appealed to me greatly; the simplistic perfection of design and the reference to nature had an enormous influence on me.

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

There is often a narrative to my paintings, usually one of thought and reflection. These five paintings were a bit of a sideline that I wanted to experiment with. The Japanese woodblock prints make a very effective imaginary landscape setting. Rendering them in oil was a challenge and each one is a bit different in its approach. I am still using elements of the woodblock aesthetic in my current work. I constantly return to it as I do most of my symbols and motives. The language and the art of painting is an ancient and profound one. I have been working on it for many years. It began with our ancestors painting on cave walls. It is never taught in art schools; very few seem to recognise its existence the way that I see it. Again, it is a fine line between inspiration and delusion or intuition and imagination. I will let the paintings testify as to my true state of being. My words are nothing but words, while paintings are actions.