Born: 1971, Taranaki, New Zealand
Lives: SEOUL
Education: Degree in Fine Arts with Honours in Painting, Otago Fine Art School; Diploma in Secondary Teaching, Christchurch College of Education.
ART QUALIFICATIONS:
1998-92 - Degree in Fine Arts with Honors in Painting
Otago Fine Art School. New Zealand
STATEMENT:
My painting, presents a series of themes that have captured my imagination and become an obsession: an often urban landscape or panorama. I have a tendency toward abstraction, whether it is the sublime perfection of the landscape or the details of decaying buildings, ruined walls or worn doorways.
I endeavour to express something about human nature, something about our needs and desires and how they affect our relationships with the land; consumerism, industrialisation, landscapes manipulated, our very existence, pressing on the land.
Living in Jakarta and Seoul I have been able to observe urban problems with a greater understanding. As buildings reflect ourselves, cities reflect our social selves. Buildings offer a frame of reference that locate us in space. When a building falls apart or is temporary, we lose our sense of security. I have seen the effect of urban density, overpopulation, dehumanization and loss of identity.
Although I am concerned with the position humanity within such a vast concrete constructed landscape, my recent work is mostly devoid of human presence; a suburban landscape that shifts between reality and the surreal. The reality is residential crowding: large numbers of people living in a small space. City streets filled with apartment buildings and row upon row of condominiums. The surreal is the soulless beauty that can be found in this manufactured landscape.
Recent works reflect a shifting New Zealand landscape, seen through windscreens and windows, out of focus and blurred, perhaps a memory rather than a moment. In retrospect I cannot escape the feeling of nostalgia, a sense of the layers of time, of places I have known and photographed on my travels. Yet still I am irrevocably tied, grounded in, born of the New Zealand landscape. It isolates, confronts and consoles me as I stand in its vast embrace. I am confronted by my own insignificance in the presence of the sublime.
