Hello and welcome!

In 2001 I graduated from the University of Auckland with a Bachelor of Visual Arts. Below is my Artist Statement from my final year exhibition. My dissertation is also online, as is my photo gallery of artwork. Please enjoy :)

My process of painting

My practice is grounded in process, or ‘playing with paint’. I have come to see painting as an ongoing explorative process rather than an ultimate one. My practice is in a constant state of defining itself through itself.

My processes are both additive and subtractive, involving an experimental technique wherein I use scraping tools to drag paint both onto and off the canvas. This process allows me a freedom from which I can exploit the material nature of paint. The act of painting involves, for me, an immediate and explicitly physical relationship with paint. Beginning without a real preconceived idea, I work responsively, almost unconsciously, my processes allowing visual possibilities to emerge. For me, the process itself is enough of an outcome.

I don’t believe I can mean or express anything in particular. Meaning behind my marks cannot be considered determinate. I allow for an open-endedness in viewer response and I expect no absolute meaning to be found. I acknowledge the subjectivity of making and viewing a work.

A visual relationship might be seen between my processes and those of Gerhard Richter, whose work I have only experienced through reproduction. Issues of originality arise from this, which I have considered, and for the moment, discounted. Critics have termed Richter’s work ‘the expression of an attitude’. If Richter’s work is an ‘expression of an attitude’ it is his attitude. Comparatively, and in spite of my initial appropriation of Richter’s processes, my attitude to my practice is my own also. I have developed my processes en route to forming my own expression and attitude amid the problems of painting.