As an emerging multimedia artist on Gunaikurnai lands in Victoria, my work seeks to bear witness to the grief and loss of nature from the anthropogenic forces of climate change.
Using a travelling camera obscura homemade from a large, enclosed box trailer I record images of loved and vulnerable natural landscapes. A recent project was ‘Reflections upon Inversion’ a body of works documenting the storm cell destruction of a beloved local rainforest in Mirboo North, 2024.
Towing the camera obscura to sites of damage and encapsulating myself within the enclosed dark interior, I paint upon the inverted and abstract images reflected upon the canvas wall. I work in near total darkness and mark – making becomes intuitive and abstract - a meditative process that assuages a deep solastalgia.
These paintings are photographed from within meshing the reflection, my painting and the photo as a single printed image and made ready for sale. Video from within the moving trailer documents these sites providing a haunting witness and memory of eerily up – ended, blurred and swirling lost landscapes.
Always curious to explore processes, I also love to set an abstract idea in motion with little intervention to see where natural laws and forces of physics lead before capturing the immediacy of any result. My work is therefore not modified or edited in anyway and is an authentic capture completed in a single session.
My drawings are similarly an expressionistic, visceral response to the loss of nature. Abstract charcoals of stripped forests and broken trees record the destruction of precious ecosystems and are executed as a somatic bodily response that works to unlock the paralysis of otherwise overwhelming helplessness.
My work is an invitation to the viewer to consider the implications of losing our natural world and to connect in feeling a shared grief. By doing so, I hope we can resist a world that seems to have largely inured itself to the loss of our cherished natural world.
Thank you for taking the time to peruse my site.
