Personal Statement

I am thinking about embodiment and transformation. Such existential musings ramp up as I age and start noticing the world differently. My attention has shifted. My priorities have changed. I decided to return to art school after an absence of more than thirty years. I realised that I needed to resume creating work. I was seventeen when I moved to Sydney to begin a Fine Arts Degree. I was told that painting was “dead” and that Figurative painting was even deader. At the end of that year, due to a series of traumatic events, I left Sydney, got a job in a Gallery, and never returned to painting. I felt as if I had had a body part amputated, but I learned to compensate and compartmentalise, to use a separate part of my mind.

During Covid, like many of us, I questioned the meaning of life. The need for expression became overwhelming. I began writing and drawing again. When lockdowns ended, I started painting lessons to give me the tools to speak. Creativity, which once was forced to sit on the back burner began boiling over. Now I am a woman on fire. I want to tell my story via portraiture and video works and celebrate what it means to catch a wave and let it carry you there. I am interested in observing and trying to document all the nuances of my shifting inner landscape. I choose whatever means necessary to capture this moment in time. I experiment with my mediums, layering, weathering and peeling away to discover what is beneath the surface. I incorporate daydreaming into my practice as a form of freedom and agency. In doing so I hope to reclaim the narrative on aging.