Things Past March–April 2020, Art Collective WA

The images in this exhibition are partly shaped by photographs, memory and imagination, creating a multilayered version of a fragmentary moment, plucked from the continuum of time.

My intention is to observe a single moment in time and pay homage to its complexity. The process of creating the works is considered, methodical and laborious. It puts the brakes on our fast paced, over consumptive and never present lives. The process is used to compose images that ignore certain visual information in order to highlight what is left. The resultant image is a heightened reality, where colours are intensified and the whole image is in focus.

The experience of seeing does not happen in isolation from the other senses. Background noise, the weather, the energy of a crowd in a public space or lack of a crowd in a public space, music playing in a car all heighten the experience of seeing. I hope these paintings portray some of the emotions I felt at the time.

Colour plays an important role in creating mood in each painting. Slight adjustments to the colour palette can change the atmosphere magically. The colour choices are adjusted enough to add a sense of theatricality but also possibility all the while retaining a link to the familiar.

Some of the paintings in this exhibition are of places travelled to while on road trips or holiday throughout Australia. They encompass geography from suburban Perth to Hobart, Launceston, Sydney and Melbourne. Most of the places I came across by happenstance on route to another destination. They are for the most part, ordinary scenes of houses, petrol stations and buildings that form the backdrop of our everyday life.

These works observe some of the ignored spaces and moments that occur in our everyday and ask us if everything can be illuminating if we stop and pay attention.