Selected Exhibitions

  • From the shoulders of giants

    I am interested in where my art comes from and in the influences on it. These works are part of an ongoing series that looks at the ideas of collaboration and the myth of the iconoclastic individual artist.

    They were made using a combination of magic and trickery involving makeup, drawings, paint and projectors. And a camera.

  • The disconsolation of art

  • Short Stories

    “All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this -- as in other ways -- they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.” John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous, "How Fast Does It Go?", 1992

     

    A lot of my work is about abstracting the everyday.  I like to find beauty in the mundane and overlooked.  I am also drawn to the chance and random actions I have limited control over.  These works have evolved from several ideas and projects that I have been working on for some time.

    One of my interests is language, especially as I live in a city where my native tongue is not the main language spoken. So, the language of language, if you can excuse the tortuous expression, attracts my attention. Language can be described as “beautiful, ugly, angry, aggressive, muscular, soft, pretty” among other things.  These same words can be used to describe objects, art works and people. I am also interested in visual language - the ability of images to tell stories and convey the passage of time.  Hence, the alternative name for the works I am showing is “Short Stories”.

    In addition to my recent re-reading of John Berger’s seminal text, “Ways of Seeing”, another inspiration for these works is Chinese calligraphy, with its emphasis on aesthetic harmony, both in the written words and in the “presentation”. This has lead me to develop a body of work as a means of telling (an abstracted) story that is not to be viewed, or thought of, as photojournalism.  

    What evolved is what you see here.  An attempt to tell a story, but one that I, as Berger points out, am only partly the author.

  • ... a poorly remembered childhood

    The photograph has long been associated with memory. Memory shapes identity and identity shapes memory, as does place.

  • Mixed Messages

  • The Pleasure of Beauty

    The images take their inspiration from a variety of sources and influences. Primarily though are the bible class stories that were taught each Sunday, and how I (miss)remember them.
    The pictures that accompanied these classes were, as I remember them, bright and colourful. And beautiful. They were my first introduction to art in a historical and spiritual sense. While I cannot remember all the pictures we were shown I have a strong memory of Salvador Dali and renaissance art juxtaposed with cartoons and what I assume now were lithographs. A question I ask myself now is is this what I saw, or am I framing my memories after subsequent experience and exposure to art and art history?
    I cannot answer that question in any honesty, and, to me, it does not matter. It has simply become
    part of the memories that make me what I am. And I am, in my work, attracted to patterns and relationships, and to the pursuit of the beautiful in the mundane. And beauty is something we are reminded of incessantly in the world that we encounter every day. It is ingrained in us like dirt under the fingernails. These works I present represent a dichotomy, some have clarity, others, memories that are real, but may be wrong.
    This work continues my exploration of my relatively traditional New Zealand spiritual upbringing. One that was, like many, more of religious convention than conviction. The idea, more than the presence, of God played a part in my family life, and therefore, my upbringing.

  • God it is all dark

  • Meaning and Beauty

    "The pursuit of beauty is (a) much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego. Beauty, like truth and goodness, is a quality that in one sense can be predicated by all great art, but the deliberate attempt to beautify can, in itself, only weaken the creative energy. Beauty in art is like happiness in morals: it may accompany the act, but it cannot be the goal of the act, just as one cannot ‘pursue happiness’, but only something else that may give happiness. Aiming at beauty produces at best, the attractive: the quality of beauty represented by the word loveliness, a quality which depends on the carefully restricted choice of both subject and technique. A religious painter, for instance can produce this quality only as long as churches keep commissioning Madonnas: if a church asks for a Crucifixion he must paint cruelty and horror instead."


    Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 1957