Artist statement:
In recent years, I’ve become more curious about my family history, which includes European immigrant roots on my mother’s side and a distant ancestral link to Yued Noongar heritage. While I don't claim deep cultural knowledge, this awareness has prompted quiet reflection on themes of place, belonging, and identity. It has gently influenced how I engage with the natural world in my painting practice.
I’ve found myself drawn to both ornamental plantings including camellias, springtime cherries, tulips and pansies as well as native species such as Jarrah (djarraly), Yarri and Marri, using flora as a way to think through layered connections to the landscapes I move through.
I live and work on the lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people and my practice is grounded in lived experience; particularly my perspective as a neurodivergent mother working within abstraction. My practice gives form to an internal world where sensory overload, disruption and joy frequently intersect. I use saturated colour, mixed media, and layered mark-making to respond to this ever-shifting state, allowing the material process to mirror emotional complexity and intensity.
Mothering young children brings a rhythm of quiet chaos, where beauty and overwhelm coexist. This sense of pace and unpredictability shapes my studio practice. I often align the process of painting to gardening, one of tending, waiting, and responding. It’s a balance of control and surrender, much like the mind’s own process of pruning and reshaping thought.
Painting also becomes a meditative, physical act. I’m influenced by the use of colour and gesture in the work of Bonnard, Monet and the Fauves, as well as the energy-driven abstraction of Joan Mitchell and the psychological landscapes of contemporaries like Shara Hughes and Claire Tabouret. My process is intuitive and iterative, circling through creation, disruption, and renewal.