Memoir & Memory

I have been painting for a long time now and when asked about my work have said very little. It’s not that I take for granted interpretations of art- I don’t for a second imagine that people would have the same thoughts or feelings as me in relation to certain themes or ideas. I do however believe that there are shared spaces that we often connect with and find in art.

Having a stall at a market has given me an incredible immediacy with the people who stop and talk to me about my work. Sometimes it can be an intense day with a constant flow of unfiltered feedback. ‘Is this you?’ I am asked when viewing the female figure in my paintings. It would be much easier to not have one, to paint animals or landscapes. It’s always the same type that asks this, and asks it again. I always say ‘no, it’s not a painting of me’  because the times when I didn’t- when I said ‘sort of’ I became the painting to them, that I had to explain, but most importantly justify. As I brush off the questions about my work that seek to dig and delve into their hidden meanings or intentions I now solely focus on the more simple exchanges of true understanding. As I brush off the questions about my work that seek to dig and delve into their hidden meanings or intentions I now solely focus on the more simple exchanges of true understanding. One woman said to me “I get it, I get what you’re doing. You speak for us” as she gestured between herself and the woman next to her. So while I paint what I know and how I feel, it is this exchange that allows me to meet people who feel the same way.

I have always invested a great deal of time in painting from nature, all good comes from it for me. From there I become creative and free, from there I begin to elaborate and speak. I spent the vast majority of my childhood in my garden. I didn’t just sit there, thinking other things, or even reading, I utterly drank it up. I was mesmerised and in total awe of nature, and I loved all of it; the daddy long leg spiders in the cubby house, the red and white spotted toadstools, the giant hedge with a cave inside and a bench where it was always cool and dark on a hot day. I loved it in there. I suffer from light sensitivity- being in the sun hurts my eyes and gives me incredible headaches, a bit of sudden light makes me sneeze and it can make it very hard to drive through dappled light. My garden was truly my sanctuary and it was massive, there was a creek at the bottom with platypus, and even baby platypus. A small orchard next to my swing on a Blackwood tree filled the air with the pungent smell of ripe pears as I soared over the creek on my round swing, circling and swinging in the green shade under an enormous canopy of trees. There was no where else I would rather be. The sound of the creek soothed me, the leaves shimmered and everything else just fell away.

I desperately needed things to fall away because my school life was incredibly hard, in the inhospitable small town I grew up in, and at only the age of nine, increasingly my home life became it too. Eventually to my utter heartbreak we had to leave this wonderful garden and move to the hell of the suburbs where there was nothing for me, I felt completely lost and exposed. I couldn’t find my way so I lost it instead in intense friendships for the sake of some sort of distraction and or company. My journey to becoming an artist was delayed by my struggles to complete maths successfully at school, possibly discalcula but never diagnosed. At school we weren’t allowed to do art until all our maths was finished, so I tried to do maths all through lunch sometimes, but still I never got to do art. Naturally I felt resentful towards the kids that seemed to have it all and were excellent at maths and had their art up in the corridor to walk past every day. They say it’s not like that now but they do so very little art at school and lots of maths, in some ways it’s just the same but more hidden. So it wasn’t until year 9 at the age of 14 that I was allowed to paint, and I could suddenly paint. I didn’t know how but I could layer colours, mix them, get things right. It was the only time I could. All of a sudden everything fell into place and I could navigate my way through something, get lost, find my way and back out again. It was the exchange between observation that became visceral.

I never looked back. I painted all night at times, I moved out of home a few days after my 17th birthday and just painted. It was a couple of years before I went to art school, I moved to Melbourne as the only thing you could do in Tasmania in the 90’s was leave. It was desolate here, there were no jobs and no prospects. So many friends turned to drugs and some didn’t make it. I rode my bike to art school each day in the thick traffic and even the sleep in my eyes was black, the dust from the construction of a massive road way outside and the constant drilling was inescapable. Our art school was incredibly hot with glass skylights and windows we couldn’t open, we were on the top floor for painting and it cooked. The strangest experience for me starting art school in Melbourne was how very much I missed Tasmania, not the culture of the place but the landscape. In art school I had my own studio for three years, the very best lecturers and mentors in the country and for once the freedom to paint all day and all I could paint was this absence, this ache for nature and peace. The constant need for the horizon, to be out of the heat and noise and distraction and be free.

It has taken a long time for me to believe in my work without feeling the need to justify it, that it is enough. The soul crippling ‘critical tutorials’ we were subjected to at art school were designed to create a reading of our work that was often overarched and, sometimes I felt, arrogant. We were supposed to be cutting edge artists who curated through societal issues in a pseudo newness, a modern plasticity, with a cool indifference, constantly told we were the future. Sometimes our ‘crits’ were so investigative and thorough that I would leave with an existential feeling of  displacement and irrelevance. I first developed panic attacks then and sometimes couldn’t actually face them anyway. I however worked very hard and got my degree with 1st class honours and a graduate award that happily came with a cheque.

The best single piece of advice I received during my whole three year Bachelor degree was a speech given to us at our graduation by the director Barrie Kosky who told us to “find our rabbit warren”- to seek out our own unique path and find our own way, to nurture our creativity there and produce work through this space of understanding. I never imagined I would find that… but sometimes these things are more real than they are apparent. To do the artwork I am doing now I had to turn away from much of what I was taught in terms of an intellectualised approach to making art, and keep all the things that I did genuinely need. The best things I have learnt from all my teachers involve process; the materiality of things. It is through this understanding that I begin my work and it always grows from there…