2024
oil paint and engraving on cork
60x 60 cm
2024
mixed media paint on board
2024
engraving on cork
Forrest through Waterfall.
Berry Springs
2018
oil paint and resin on plywood
95x 70cm
private collection
Tasting Notes;
The tropics cured my fear of sharks. Surfing in Byron bay one christmas, escaping the wet, I saw turtles whilst riding a wave. The shell had transformed into lizard… I was certain the crocs where out to get me, the ruthless psychopaths defy anthropomorphism and they’ll be heading south with climate change.
Berry Springs in the Northern Territory is a magical place, made even more so by the climate.
I thought 100% humidity meant a sea of fog, like being underwater in a mist of cold wet pearl… I was wrong. The tropics are superb at humbling people, especially during wet season, when Berry Springs are closed, because of man eating salt-water crocodiles.
In the middle of the wet season I jumped the fence at Berry Springs, under the dappled light of the high trees I vainly looked for crocs. I then slipped into the knee-deep water over river sand and I crouched under this waterfall, and looked back up at a tiny patch of blue through a veil of liquid diamond.
This painting is that image
Double Bay; Autumn
2021
oil paint and spray paint on stainless steel
Private Collection
Tasting Notes;
We sit atop the foundation of industry.
Looking out at the clear autumn light,
the clarity is breathtaking.
The perspective elevated,
the wealth abundant.
This is painted on garbage, destined for landfill.
Stainless steel, silver sky lined inevitability .
Double Bay, works in isolation, upon building waste in Autumn 2021
Fire Over Water
2018
mixed media, paint, wood stain, smoke stain and resin on plywood
70x 95cm
P.O.A
Tasting Notes;
Art is not homewares.
It is a vessel to transmit an idea or moment of magnitude.
Art is a stationary focal point that bridges the illusion of the infinite, being beyond reach and connection.
Tanami Fire Season
2018
mixed media, paint, wood stain, smoke stain and resin on plywood
70x 95cm
P.O.A
Tasting Notes
I worked in the Tanami desert, at supposedly Australia’s most isolated mine. Six hundred kilometers west of Alice Springs, or if I missed the plane from Darwin, a two-day drive, mostly on dirt. It was a 70km drive from the camp to the hole... the only other traffic, trucks over one hundred metres in length dragging out epic volumes of rock, to be crushed to dust and washed in arsenic. The road lined with power poles, obsolete and useless except for the occasional eagles nest.
After the power lines had been built, it became apparent the power plant wasn’t compatible. Too expensive to tear down, they stood and still stand, impotent and useless... a testimony to the ambition of “progress”, now a residue of history.
The landscape truly makes fools of ‘modern men’; its immensity and ancient hostility that is tinged with pastels that stretch out from the dawn and dusk and find their way into a desert with seasonal floods and choruses of frogs, cheeky pure bred dingo’s capable of both horrendous violence and hilarious thievery and zebra finches who quietly pile up dead under trees by the tailings ponds.
“The stain is deep in our chalk.” – Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu
Cockatoos
2018
acrylic and oil on canvas
77x 60cm
Private Collection
Hostile Design.
The Many Arms of the Law
2019
wood stain, oil paint and resin on plywood
47x 27cm
Private Collection
Tasting Notes
“Only the poor break laws – the rich evade them” T-Bone Slim
The title, ‘hostile design’, is reference to the four armrests on a public bench seat. It is a style known as ‘hostile architecture’ or ‘defensive urban design’.
In this case, the specific intent is to render public space unusable to people in need of a place to sleep.
The Sydney Olympics proliferated this form of architecture in the urban landscape.
Sydney's public spaces changed to become restrictive places we are either locked into or locked out of. It was the “bread and circuses” cover up, under which sniffer dogs where brought onto the streets, and the socioeconomic vibrancy of the city was scaled down from primary colours to pastel echoes.
A ‘Black Swan’ is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable than it was.
Here it swims with its ugly duckling - a cost/benefit analysis of hosting the 2000 Olympics
Camperdown Oval
2021
this image is a reproduction of the original which occurs on form ply stepped out off the wall. available as a print on request
on paper 120x120 cm
modified 80x 120x 29cm
P.O.A
Tasting Notes;
I was sixteen or seventeen the first time I was in a room with people shooting up.
They had been up all night using heroin, I turned up with a girl selling speed from a suburb made famous by a detention centre, I was selling acid, she said “he’s cool” and that was that.
The thing about doing a double bathroom and kitchen renovation in a small inner city flat is… the toilet, it gets knocked out pretty early on. So each day I would walk to the end of the street and across Camperdown Oval to the public toilets for my ritual religious experience.
I put the cap on the fit, and placed it in the sharps bin, my usual enlightened elation from dropping a turd instead replaced with the haunting dread of unreliable, self destructive behaviour, memories of overdoses, deaths and near misses… what seemed like life times ago was all of a sudden, emotion and immediately present.
Leaving the toilet I felt like shit, as I walked out to the picket fence surrounding Camperdown Oval, the sun exploded from behind a grey cloud, it really was a gorgeous day, I realised as long as I’m present to the moment… life is beautiful enough just as it is and the gate was open, all I had to do was walk on.
this painting is based off a photo I took at that moment.
Dunbar's Principle Loom
2018
mixed media and resin on plywood
90x 60cm
P.O.A
Tasting Notes
This is based on an image of 'Kowloon Walled City' a lawless zone in Hong Kong that was demolished in the early 90's.
‘Dunbar's number’ is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.
By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, Dunbar proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.
He explained it informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar."
Loom is a frame or machine for interlacing at right angles two or more sets of threads or yarns to form a cloth… it also means an impending problem, an indistinct form of magnitude appearing on the horizon or through fog or darkness.
Dawn Tree
2022
mixed media paint, resin on recycled stainless steel
54x 37cm
P.O.A
Tasting Notes;
This is painted on stainless steel; from a kitchen in Camperdown, this piece of stainless steel would otherwise be in landfill.
The stains are temporary.
Forming streaks down the pane.
The wind moves through palm fronds cast black in early morning shadow.
There is a correlation between the fingers on the fronds tickling the breeze and the runs and streaks marking the measure of particulate waste smeared down the glass, a measure of time.
Madness is thinking I can finger paint in the dust from inside the room, that my touch will disturb the dirt on the other side of the pain.
it is time to meditate.
Flugelmans Balcony
2022
mixed media paint, resin on stainless steel
P.O.A
Tasting Notes
The fog rolled in heavy, rose up the valley and swallowed it all.
Horizon, ocean, paddocks, livestock and sky.
All that remained were the closest trees and the silver swirling mist that crept across the deck and leeched away the warmth from my insides.
This view is off the old deck of Bert Flugelman’s place on Jamberoo Mountain Road, I stayed on site, on and off for 6 weeks, replaced the timber decks and a few other things. This painting is a truly delightful fluke of synchronicity that I created sometime during that six week period.
This is painted on stainless steel; from a kitchen in Camperdown, this piece of stainless steel would otherwise be in landfill.
At the time of painting it, I didn’t realise Bert Flugelman was known for his stainless steel sculptures, I really had no idea who he was, until one day walking through the city at the corner of Spring and Pitt St I realised the giant stainless steel sculpture there, was one of his… somehow I had him mixed up with his neighbour a painter older than the Archibald, Guy Warren whose shack was on the same dirt track and whose paintings where throughout the property.
Cormorants Riding Dusk
2018
mixed media, metallic tint, wood stain, oil paint and resin on recycled concrete form board.
66x 90cm
P.O.A
Tasting Notes
The cold water is heavy.
Paddle arms soft and ineffectual.
A single gull screeches like an old gate hinge in the big empty blue.
The clouds lie heavy and green on rusted dusk.
Storm swell chaotic.
Life is complex.
Respect is simple.
Nature is nature.
The art of appreciating a landscape.
Hearing the roar in silence.
Feeling the peace in chaos.
Time dissolving in the golden glint of shadow.
The hope, people stop and reflect
Look a new, recognise nature as a cyclical integral fluid.
This image draws heavily on Japanese influence and my fixation with cormorants when surfing
Snowclone
2021
mixed media, metallic tint, oil paint and resin on recycled concrete form board.
85x 67cm
P.O.A
Tasting Notes
A ‘snowclone’ is a type of clichéd expression where banal phrases become highly adaptable and can be switched up to suit any situation, but the basic formula stays the same… cloned.
Blah is the new BlahBlah
the only good BlahBlah is a dead BlahBlah
the Blah to end all Blah’s
BlahBlah is my middle name
to Blah or not to Blah
There is a lightness and darkness to all things, both sides of the trunk in this painting, a night and day, spring and autumn… I need to see the open sky and watch the light play on trees, see the birds and listen to their songs… its liable to suck me down any given day without it, and I’m scared, scared of the havoc I will wreak when I come back up, weaponised, swinging blind with madness and rage... i know it sounds cliched, but that's why I make art.
Kookaburra
2018
mixed media, metallic tint, oil paint and resin on recycled concrete form board.
60x 60cm
Private Collection
Water Under The Bridge
2021
mixed media paint and resin on form plywood
150x 120cm
P.O.A
Tasting Notes;
My work is committed to refuse, reused to refute the value of waste.
gallows humour mixed with absurdism in its social commentary, presented through a palate of happy colours back lit by smoke stains, rust and assorted garbage.
this was created on a piece of concrete formwork plywood, 'appropriated' from a building site i worked on, it occurs on the frame board of a concrete floor and challenges the flaw in the idea of 'getting over it'
it reminds me of the view north across the water from under the harbour bridge