I work across two mediums, painting and drawing, using ink and pencil on paper, or found pigments and tube pigments on canvas.

Most of my drawings are responses to two regions: the desert region north east of Broken Hill, where I portray mulga, a variety of acacia in its desert setting, and the gorges of Central Victoria.

A tree can be seen in two different ways – as a fixed body in space or interdependent with clouds for water and sunlight, air and soil for nourishment. A tree life is always evolving, it’s not fixed. It’s unborn. As when I stand in front of a blank piece of paper drawing a tree, I recognise the ongoing presence of form arising out of absence.

In the two-dimensional surface, the sky, usually seen as negative space, is filled with the light of an unseen sun. The appearance and disappearance of light behind the tree is an interplay of brightness and dimness reflecting the constancy of change. The experience of light can be transcendent. Doesn’t the sky contain an invisible atmosphere of life-giving carbon dioxide? The desert earth, scene of vast geological transformations of mountains welling up from sea floors, provides the mulga with mineral nutrients and a place for roots to grow. The geological maps in my drawings witness the primordial processes of the earth, which have shaped the land from deep time, giving rise to the landforms I portray.

“A poet looking at a blank sheet of paper will see a floating cloud, even though there is no cloud drawn there. Without a cloud, there will be no rain, without rain, the trees cannot grow; without trees we cannot make paper.” - Nhat Hanh