I am intrigued by the contradiction in our concept of nature—how it holds both jurisdiction over the future of humanity while remaining vulnerable to our exploitation of it as a resource. Through still life painting, surreal non-human portraiture, and sculpture in a variety of materials I am thinking through human intervention into the natural world and the dark—and sometimes unconscious—reverberations of our actions. In my work, hope and safety sit adjacent to an ominous unknown. Replicas feed themes of misreadings and glamourous (or poor) subsitutions. Absurdity questions who owns reality.
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I would find them in anything that could hold liquid: Tupperware in the fridge, toilets, humidifiers in closets, rain buckets, et cetera. The fish were barely moving; becoming buoyant in green-tinted water, swimming sideways in a tank where most of the water had evaporated, or they’d cannibalized half of a mate out of starvation.
In the early years of this recurring nightmare, someone would usually arrive on scene to inform me it was my fault—that I’d been negligent as a fish caretaker. In the latter years, no one would come, but I knew. And I would wake up in all-consuming grief.
For over 15 years I reckoned with my culpability, haunted by why I kept getting subpoenaed in my sleep to contend with a criminal charge of unintentional attempted fish murder, even though I always woke up before they were dead. When I started to make a correlation with the timeline, I realized that in those 15 years I had stopped making art. When I started to make art again, I would find the fish in a tank, but with a slice of pizza I would have on hand for them.
Of course, I was still admiring art during that time and taking in what I look to now as influential: Goya, Ken Price, Jean Dubuffet, Sidney Nolan, Rufino Tamayo, Dorothea Tanning, Fischli & Weiss, Mike Kelley—or most anything that felt like it was trying to laugh through a broken heart. The writings of naturalist Edward. O Wilson, Donna Haraway, poet Ern Malley and Goethe's ideas on "delicate empiricism" have influenced my work.