ARTIST STATEMENT
My fascination with Australia’s Eastern Seaboard and its iconic architectural beauty springs from my teenage years living in Sydney’s North and being an avid surfer and later extensively travelling the east coast in rock and roll bands. The Art Deco Bathing Pavilions, Surf Clubs and Ocean Baths of Australia’s East Coast have been a constant motif and preoccupation in my work.
This nostalgia connected to the landscape of my youth is an important element of my work both thematically and emotionally. Memories saved from my youth revolve around the architecture that I grew up with – the 20’s and 30’s bungalows, which can verge on a kind of ‘kitsch comfortability’ and were never really appreciated at the time. It is only with the perspective of many years that we Baby Boomers come to a new appreciation of these architectural icons.
In my work I aim to not only capture something about the Australian experience of ‘landscape’, how we impose ourselves upon it, how we exist in it; but to also explore how our intense antipodean light illuminates and dominates that whole experience.
Above all my work is a celebration of our unique Australian landscape and my response to it.
GREAT SOUTHERN SURFCLUB
