I’m Starting To Unravel Here

When I was 10 years old I had a best-friend who was 13.  She lived in a house that resembled a small medieval castle. In hindsight, I think it was just a brick house with a fancy roof. At the time though, it was wondrous. 

We bonded over a shared conviction that magical creatures were definitely real. This was not a far-fetched notion for either of us. I was raised on the fringes of a small religion with a blue god. She was raised in a castle.

Although clearly relevant in retrospect, It was not our shared faith in the mystical that set the course for this body of work. Instead, it was a comment my best-friend made one afternoon while we searched for fairies by the creek at the bottom of my parent’s bush block. Casually, eye’s trained a huge fern above us, she observed: “When you look at that you see it as green. But I could be seeing it as blue. How could we know?” 

My whole world stopped dead, suspended in a kind of shocked awe as the forest around us flickered from greens and browns to ... NEON PINK! After a moment, things slid into earth-toned motion once more. But my world was a little off kilter. It never really righted itself. 

I’m Starting To Unravel Here is a nod towards that childhood epiphany. One I am sure I share with many. How could we ever really know?  I’ve spent the subsequent years clinging to and then discarding various versions of reality. Getting lost in questions of truth, faith and perception.

Lately, these questions play out in the quiet of my own mind while I go through the motions of an increasingly solitary and introspective home life. A life that has become unravelled in this new pandemic reality.

The spaces I reference in my work have come to represent thresholds for me. I’ve spent my days trying to catch a glimpse of something beyond memory, belief or projection. But it’s as though my eyes are refusing to adjust to the dark. Instead of finding certainty, disparate truths converge and the reality around me becomes distorted. Forms become unrecognisable. Figures get lost in the dark.

These works are an attempt to give visual form to this experience. Despite my constant urge to make sense of them, my works are deliberately indistinct. I’ve grown to love hearing people’s descriptions as though they’re gazing at Rorshchach’s inkblots, giving me brief insight into their own secret histories.

Each medium brings its own distinct quality and insight for me. Working with installation helps me to refine and clarify my ideas. I turned to water and light as a means to examine the tension between transparency and obscurity. The known and the unknowable.  I work with oil paint for it’s suppleness and freedom. My paintings tend to be changing right up until the very end. They are dreamscapes, portraits of consciousness. 

And it was while I had the camera pressed up against my cheek, attempting to capture a ‘replica’ of the real world while simultaneously obscuring it, that I really began to understand what it is I am interested in. My work is concerned with the subjectivity of the real.