Search

       You have an incredible distinctive style using fluorescent paint within the Australian landscape. Can you tell us why you work with this colour palette and how does it help you communicate the stories behind your artworks?

Intensified and graduated fluorescent tones help me create uncanny effects in my landscapes, tipping the image over from pleasant sunset vista into something more eerie and mysterious, suggestive also of climate change impacts. I undertake multiple layers to obtain such smooth blank skies. The cloudless emptiness that results, has, for me, an aspect of existential colonial loneliness. Each picture celebrates the bush, while exposing the myriad ecological impacts of deforestation.

Could you step us through your artistic process? How are your ideas formed?

For recent bodies of work (broadly underpinned by the theme of ‘colonial heat’) I undertake field trips to key sites in the Otways and Tasmania. I live more than half the time at Cape Otway on a landcare property shared with others so we are always planting there, restoring Manna gum populations (E. Viminalis) as best we can. This species has been completely decimated by introduced koala populations. It’s hard, slow work, but rewarding. There’s also plenty of opportunity to walk out into the bush and witness positive change in the diversity, and even be inspired by remnant old growth forests. Field trips (local and interstate), photo-documentations and the archival study of early colonial paintings are also a seminal part of my early painting process. I like to compare silhouetted vegetation profiles of early colonial paintings with contemporary ecological profiles. This helps me better understand ecological losses over time, the takeover of invasive species. So my works have one foot in the cultural past and another firmly in the present.

Your artworks are deeply connected to ecological disturbance. In your words “The hyperreal sunsets are nothing if not cautionary. I think of each painting as a theatre of environmental mourning.” Could you tell us how you came to choose these themes as your subject matter? What influenced you to take your work in this direction?

The more I learn about the evolution of clearfelling industries in this country the more existential grief I feel. This kind of feeling has been termed ‘solastalgia’ by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, a word that describes what has been lost and what will yet be lost, that names the feeling arising from unwanted changes occurring in our shared place, our place ‘at home’.  I appreciate that such a settler word goes nowhere near describing the grief arising from dispossession of country for First Nations peoples. I ultimately see my paintings as elegies, lamentations that allow a space for forest memory, but also for solastalgia. That being said, I deeply admire myriad conservationist efforts to restore habitats across the country. Good things are being achieved by dedidcated teams of scientists often against political and funding odds.

Not only are you a talented painter, but you are also a writer. Do you keep these two worlds separate or does one inform the other?

I’m always, always writing in the studio, making notes and jottings about individual paintings, mostly about the respective art-historical contexts and making of each work, large or small. However, such notations are not necessarily exhibitable or publishable. For example, in painting Sixteen Kinds of Blackberry, Otways, I was thinking and writing about Arthur Streeton’s landscapes that featured splodges of yellow-flowered gorse. Such weeds we once celebrated, nostalgically, as acclimatised plants and now they pose huge ecological problems. Elsewhere, I write, publish and teach environmental and so-called ‘confessional’ poetry (a term that modern poets rejected themselves back in the day). Some might say that much of the poetry alludes to studio project ideas around postcolonial and ecological art. Five collections of poetry later, I nonetheless realise that I like to keep poetry and painting distinct as separate genres; each has its own formal discipline, its own worldly outcomes, though ideas do overlap.  I now accept that I love to work across two disciplines. For me, the combination is dynamic and pleasurable. I love to view/read/make/write  both kinds of work. My professional teaching work has also been heavily bound up with reading and writing across the genres.

In your artist statement you have mentioned that you “map the vegetation profiles of early colonial paintings against contemporary ecological profiles, so that each work becomes a mash-up of past and present.” Could you tell us more about this process? Is it difficult to find early references of the Otways?

As many may know, Eugene von Guerard’s iconic 1855 painting of Tower Hill was used to revegetate the ruin of Tower Hill near Warnambool in the 1980s.  However, I learned on field trips, and in discussion with Council rangers that this restoration, while a vast improvement on the barren, denuded agricultural landscape which Tower Hill became by the 1970s, is not perfect – far from it – the understorey has not recovered as it needs to, with species diversity remaining limited as a result.  The green silhouette looks impressive, attracting tourists and picnickers, but restoration has been only partially committed to by governments and councils and more resources are needed. Von Guerard travelled throughout Gadubamud and Wathaurong County in the Otways, balancing homestead painting commissions with sketches of sites of great natural beauty. I have looked at the vegetation silhouettes of some of von Guerard’s drawings. Where possible, I have hiked in and photographed the sites he worked on, documenting invasive species, logging impacts et al. I’ve also looked at topographical sketches made by artists and naturalists on voyage expeditions to Van Diemen’s Land such as Lesueur, Piron, Labillardiére and others. Oftentimes, ship’s artists like Louis Piron, in thrall to myth’s of a lost continent and racist myths of noble savagery, idealise country and First Nations peoples in problematic ways. They provide fascinating, if disturbing archives of seeing, looking and visualising. On top of archival visual resources, I often access contemporary ecological surveys and period photographs of areas such as Lavers Hill, Forest and Beech Forest, areas where timbergetting flourished in 19th century Victoria and beyond. Putting all this information together helps me create an imaginative and complex portrait of remnant forest as a symbol of ecological dispossession.  I aim to visually honour what we have lost, and what we have left alongside.

Your artworks have a consistent duality. How do you manage the aesthetic beauty of each painting and the artistic techniques while maintaining the environmental story behind each artwork?

With great difficulty! It takes me a long time to work out the deceptively simple compositions. If you look closely, there is an element of disjuncture between the curtain walls of remnant forest, stripped plains and blank skies. Something is not quite tonally right, so an uncanny mood is promulgated. I hope to provoke a response in the viewer that is not just about aesthetic beauty.  Whether forest is lush or stripped out completely, I depend on the heightened colour schemes and the quality of compositional disjuncture to carry the weight or mood of ecological disturbance. The sunsets are not merely pretty, the romance is deceptive. Strange sunsets flare over cleared and compacted country, over tracts of land that hover between toxicity and tantalisation, devastation and dream.

What does a typical studio day look like for you?

Typically I need to stretch, walk or swim before arriving at the studio. Painting is a very physical activity and gentle exercise is always meditative, helping me focus and sometimes even solve compositional and technical problems subconsiously. I have usually already made many thumbnail sketches before beginning work at the studio proper. Living at Cape Otway provides me with many opportunities to think about my subject matter. There I can hike, plant and paint –  in that order. I may then spend around four to six hours working, though these hours  become more consistent as I work towards exhibition deadlines. Painting the skies needs to be done on the flat to avoid errors and drips, while detailing the massive banks of forest requires shifting back to the easel, so that the grander forest can be detailed vertically. Often these processes are enormously repetitive and I have had to teach myself patience, to value slow time.

Your current exhibition ‘Enclosure Acts, New Landscapes’ tells a story via the exhibition design. Could you discuss how the artworks move from romantic forest grandeur through to landscapes stripped bare?

The painting series Remnant Blush 1-6, and Remnant Gold 1-6 in particular evoke a cinematic dissolution of lush forest through to stripped plains. In these small works, native timbers have mostly been clear-felled and epicormic growth from tree stumps struggle to gain traction. The understorey has either been completely cleared or burnt off. Fire risk  escalates wherever this happens, my warm palette might suggest. A sense of mourning attaches to these scenes which is compounded by policy inertia by state governments. Logging is part of a colonial continuum as NSW and Tasmania are still logging old growth forests without cease. And, as the recent ABC Four Corners report Timber Turmoil revealed (22 June 2026), the former Allen government in Victoria, despite having banned native forest logging in Victoria, has been importing old growth timbers from publicly owned Tasmanian land, moving timber across on the Spirit of Tasmania, to Victorian mills outside Geelong and the Yarra Valley. What happens when our habituated yearning for aesthetic landscapes meets such perilous facts and policy voids head on? What kind of landscape paintings can I make in light of this knowledge? I am trying to work this out every day, once again, trying for visual and emotional complexity, keeping romance in check as I navigate that which the late Australian philosopher Val Plumwood has  called the ‘shadow places’ of colonial history.