Fifteen thousand, nine hundred and ninty nine

Charcoal on manipulated paper (wrecked would be another word for it. 15992 is the number of blades of grass in the work

Composite #1

Works from this period were concerned with the vernacular abstract language of the suburbs and urban environment.

Women's silence : in the space of words and images

My thesis is made up of words and images. This study investigates the way in which silence operates productively within and between the two modes of communication. I suggest that in the process of changing words into images or scripto-visual art-practice, the silence in women's lives can be articulated. I argue that women draw on the generative qualities of silence to create forms of speech that override the cultural constructions of gender which have placed them within the space of ‘mute’ silence. To gain an historical perspective of this practice by women, I consider the lives of medieval nuns within religious enclosure and their work with words and images in the illuminated manuscript. I make a comparative study of original illuminated manuscripts, focussing mainly on visual language and locating aspects of the work closest to my own art-practice: the visual treatment of the space and inter-textual components of the page or folio. This project does not include an examination of miniatures or historiated initials. Rather, its aim is to identify and compare the use of other aesthetic devices available to the medieval scribe/artist through which they might have interacted with the text. I suggest links between verbal and visual performances of language and the repetition, or copying of texts by medieval nuns, as a means of female embodiment of words and their spaces. From the outcomes of my studio investigations and my consideration of other contemporary feminist art practices, I demonstrate how women artists may ‘re-write’ the text and ‘speak’ their silence through visual language and the acts of writing, drawing and painting the words of others. Through my engagement with feminist critical theory, the work of medieval scholars, original illuminated manuscripts and my studio research, I propose that scripto-visual practice remains particularly significant for women despite the differences between the medieval period and our own. As a generative practice, it negotiates some of the societal constraints on women's speech and visibility, because its language is ‘silent and disembodied’ from the image of woman constructed by male discourse. It is a form of speech that acknowledges as it defies the social and cultural conditions that shaped its necessity, articulating an alternative voice of women in the space of words and images.

Ned Kelly wallpapers: Spring variation 2008

The simple abstractions of the Ned Kelly Wallpaper Series attempt to take some of the puff out of the larrikin myth that surrounds the Ned Kelly figure These paintings destabilise the heroic expressionist gesture (beloved of Sidney Nolan) as modest pattern - as one of the many avaìlable patterns of history

Nearamnew

Nearamnew is a work inscribed in the cobblestones of Federation Square consisting of nine regional forms constructed out of the letters that name the site—each containing a local vision of Federation. These regional forms and their embedded concrete poems are three dimensional. Cut into three depths of the surface of stone each layer of text interconnects diagonally and vertically. Comprises a whorl pattern, nine ground figures and nine vision texts.

Tracks

The artwork is intended to celebrate the rich cultural heritage of North Terrace and by extension, the many layered cultural facets of South Australia. It is called ‘Tracks’ because the stories are presented as moving tracks of electronic text in vertical columns, in an LED(lighting omitting diode) medium. It is also called ‘Tracks’ because the siting of the LED pillars is determined by a ‘variable grid’ ground pattern which forms a significant feature of the new landscape design. It celebrates the cultural heritage of North Terrace through the composition of four text gathering histories, anecdotes, facts and aspirations under the four headings of air, water, fire and earth. These stories are presented to the public as four colour differentiated continuous streams or tracks of electronic text in four columns placed on the northern side of North Terrace.

The gift of perseverance

The Exhibition was held as a part of  Melbourne Writers Festival, 2008

Fiction in oils

Comprises a collection of seventeen stories based on Australian women's paintings and a critical exegesis that together represent a creative and theoretical response to the ways in which short fiction writing can be informed by visual art.