About

I live in the city of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. It was founded more than two hundred years ago, as a convict settlement. Epochal changes are happening: the devastation of the natural world accelerates, the wreckage of a twentieth-century industrial wasteland continues its decline, and we live, with all our distractions, in the midst of carnage.

At this moment of closure and transition, we are experiencing a period of extinction. The abandoned, the neglected, the despised, the condemned, those who will determine what happens . . . are the survivors.

My neighbours bear witness every day of their lives to the destructive processes that surround us. Their lives are a testament to the forgotten and overlooked. Through their own beliefs and faith, through strength in adversity, through lived experience and community, they hold a hope and a knowledge that can survive any challenge, whether man-made or natural.

The two forms I practise to create art are painting and photography. As a painter, I align myself with Expressionism, not because it is fashionable (or for that matter unfashionable), but because it is a realist style that nevertheless allows emotional truths a voice. Sometimes these truths are bodied forth in what might be called presences.

As a photographer, too, I express emotional realities, primarily through the documentation of the lives we lead and the environments in which we now live: photographic evidence of present and past, dilemmas and continuities.

I practise ‘High Art’ in various forms of alchemy, and I find myself particularly drawn towards religious imagery: not simply from the two-thousand-year period of Christian iconography, but imagery from older artistic traditions around the world as well.

I am also interested in the connection between art and science, with a strong personal focus on patterns of animal behaviour and the connections between humans and animals.

With intuition as my guide, and an awareness of artistic tradition, I attempt to reveal presences that may give us clues as to what is real and unreal: an unusual and valuable perspective. I am not seeking a form of aesthetic contemplation, but a way of finding guidance. My art is the documentation of this search.