A view of water, 2025, oil, screen print and lacquer on aluminium, 140 cm x 130 cm
From my studio in Nipaluna/West Hobart, I catch a sliver of Timtumili Minanya/Derwent Estuary—a glimpse that, on occasion, carries me back to stories of the colonial whaling industry’s devastating toll. This painting recalls that view, combining it with the fate of James Bruni Kelly, aged 21, killed by a blow from a whale in 1841. My view is entangled within fragments of a painting by William Duke, which hangs in TMAG - the museum that stands between me and the water. The view is fractured, partial and never wholly grasped; still waiting to be fully interpreted.
Exhibited in the Hadley’s Art Prize finalist exhibition, 2025
It's Difficult (the wanderer), 2024, oil, acrylic and lacquer on aluminium panel, 140 x 130 cm
Exhibited in Waymarking, Painting, Undertow, 2024, and CONSTANCE ARI Archive,
Under the cover of smoke, 2022, acrylic, oil, and lacquer on aluminium panel, 140 x 130 cm
Some background:
This painting responds to James Kelly's handwritten account of his 1815 circumnavigation of lutruwita, Tasmania. The log was written at least six years after the events (probably longer). According to Kelly, on the 28th of December, he navigated a whaling boat into the calm waters of a natural harbour on the West coast of Tasmania. At the entrance, Kelly and his crew rowed through clouds of smoke generated, he supposed, by Aboriginal hunters. Kelly named the harbour 'Macquarie Harbour'. In the painting, Kelly's partially obscured boat slips through speculative, fragmented views of tannin waters, under cover of the abstract forces that regulate them, and the shrouds of smoke that still linger.
The painting was exhibited in the Tidal Art Prize 2022 and the Pop Up Exhibition series, UTAS, Inveresk, 2024
There are mountains we will never climb, 2021, acrylic, oil, and lacquer on aluminium panel, 147 x 135 cm
After a hike through the Tasmanian central highlands, I thought about Geoff Dyer’s Narcissus Bay (2013). Did he climb Mount Ida before he died? Thinking about mortality and Narcissus led me to pose as Manet’s Dead Toreador (1864), supine before Tasmanian mountains that I will never climb. I thought of Friedrich’s Wanderer (1818) and his pastiched mountainscapes and then, the melancholy of 2020 isolation.
This painting was exhibited in the Hadley’s Art Prize exhibition, Hobart, 2022 and This Is No Fantasy, 2023.
Learning to row, 2023, acrylic, oil, and lacquer on aluminium panel, 2023
in this painting, I reflect on a childhood boating accident and the death of Thomas Kelly, 1842, drowned after a boating accident in the lower Derwent.
The smoke was so thick, 2021, acrylic, oil, and lacquer on aluminium panel, 170 x 150cm
This painting uses fragments of text from James Kelly’s diary account of his 1815 circumnavigation of Lutruwita/Tasmania in 1815, specifically the morning he entered Macquarie Harbour.
No prospect, no refuge, 2018, oil and enamel paint on aluminium, 180 cm x 150 cm
Jay Appleton’s theory applied to a migrant’s view of Lutruwita/Tasmania.
Exhibited at Bett Gallery, 2019, Migratory Aesthetics, Plimsoll Gallery, 2020