It’s 2025

Some how I blinked and 2025 snuck in with barely a sound.

During 2024, I re-presented The Arrangements: assembling nature in a solo exhibition at Funaki Gallery in Melbourne and titled it The Rearrangements. It was an opportunity for me to re-contextualise the work within a contemporary domestic setting of a salon-style apartment/gallery. The original body of work was made during 2022/ 2023 in response to a year-long residency at Carrick Hill, an English style manor house and formal garden nestled in the Adelaide foothills. I examined plant /human relationships largely through a post-colonial lens.

Many compelling themes arose from the research influenced by the schism between the highly managed formal garden and the remnant endemic bushland that rims the site. Over time, I became acutely aware of the compelling tensions between them and put very simply, the ways we seem to intervene in and ‘bend’ nature to suit our needs. Not a square centimetre remains untouched.

So many struggles of conscience arose; where does our understanding of ‘natural’ and cultivated landscape, conservation, preservation, management and ‘ownership’ originate? Why is there such scant documentation of pre-colonial history? These questions are ever-expanding.

The works were a direct response to these conundrums. They are an interweaving of old and new threads, definitely not meant as answers or solutions.

2024 was also an intense and extraordinary year on making. I came to know the value of making from the heart, renew my vows in a way to this primal drive.

I will always examine my life and art practice through a maker’s lens. This way of seeing and being in the world has gained such personal gravity in recent years. The movement it creates enables a better connection to core imperatives- including listening to, learning about and caring for the land I occupy. One step at a time, and thinking beyond my own lifespan.

There is no actual gap ever in arts practice; life pours in and out everyday, it’s a continuum.

Gray Street Workshop turns forty in 2025 and we are celebrating. In April ‘Beautiful Tensions’, an exhibition of the work of the four current partners will open at the JamFactory and go on to tour nationally for the next three years. We have all made significant bodies of work that will come together in one space. Along the way we have gathered each week to share in our process and progress. It is an incredible experience to mentor and be mentored by your closest colleagues. The Jamfactory Adelaide is playing host . There will be a most beautiful, quirky, enlightening book written by Anne Brennan and designed by Rachel Harris of Bit Scribbly Design. And there will be a movie and and and and!!!! Cant wait!

The show opens to the public April 22nd in the main gallery of the Jamfactory. I hope you all get a chance to join us for all the celebrations. The official opening is on May 8th with the book launch and artist talk on the May 10th.

Forty years! Hey! Still vital, still absolutely committed to practice, still learning, still making!

The Arrangements – assembling nature

February - April 2022

I’m ensconced as artist in residence in a remarkable place.

This is a creative project that offers an extraordinary opportunity to build on established concerns about our impact on the environment and to consider the relationship between the domestic and scientific interpretation of the natural world, from both historic and contemporary perspectives.

Carrick Hill is a grand house filled with an eclectic and historically significant art collection, surrounded by extensive heritage gardens ringed by native bushland. The original contents of the house are almost completely intact and the grounds undiminished.

Carrick Hill is a time capsule of privileged mid-twentieth century life in Adelaide, with domestic spaces that exude the power of living with art. My interest lies in unpicking the relationship of the garden to the house; to investigate the roles and rituals of cultivation, harvest, arrangement and display, that plants played in the life of the residents. To look at the relationship we now have with the natural world under changed circumstances and global pressures. To reflect on causes and shifting attitudes towards environmental consciousness.

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Situated in the heart of the house is a special, purpose-built room - the flower room. Rather like a home laboratory, it is dedicated to arranging flowers, fresh-cut from the lavish gardens. Assembled and distributed around the house, these arrangements were significant to the artistic vigour of the domestic spaces and an important daily ritual.

During this project I’ll consider the notion of the home laboratory as a place to study the critical and shifting relationships between plants and humans, as a place to explore the role of nature within the fabric of the everyday. The daily ritual of bringing the outside in queries the role and interpretation of nature.

There are two fundamental questions that underpin this project, the first - in today’s world how do we engage with the environment around us when we are distanced from it? The second - can living with art inform the art of living?

I’m looking forward to being absolutely immersed here for a few months, then the plan is to shift to my studio to generate a creative response that will be presented at Carrick Hill over the period of the 2023 Adelaide Festival.