Shacks
In 2021 I held an open studio and exhibition of recent work for South Australian Living Artists (SALA).
I had moved to the southern coast only a year previously, into a ’60s beach shack, and I wanted to make a homage to shack life.
Shacks are predominantly wooden, and simple in construction. Being along the coast they are subjected to salt and wind and summer sun. They fade and peel and sometimes leak. And we love them. I raised them up on long legs, impossible stilts, to elevate them and give them the presence that, in real life, they do not need. They stand tall and proud in their wooden skin and TV antennas.
At the end of SALA I made one more shack. Then I held a ritual shack burning, symbolically closing the exhibition.
Proprium
Making this body of work entirely based on feelings and memories of my earlier self meant I could present work that is felt rather than read literally. It was important that everything I used had integrity, to form a cohesive whole.
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
Leo Tolstoy
Working with box/house-like structures allowed me to peer inside and show hidden meanings and feelings. We have an outer and inner self, how we are perceived and who we are privately. No one really knows us completely, and so some things are hidden. I want people to look inside and find more than appears at first glance.
Entanglement
With Entanglement I began to move outwards. Although in some instances small items (fine silver objects or coal) were inside a few of the pieces, most showed the world their characters, with old iron, slag (collected from around the silver mine at Broken Hill), lead or coal hanging beneath their bodies.
These were ‘instinctively symbolic’ in that it felt right to use whatever material I used on that sculpture in that way. So, as with the Proprium series, I was exploring my world view, and my feelings without analytical interrogation. This body of work was shown at BMG Gallery in Adelaide South Australia in 2025.
Burdens
We all carry burdens. They shape our lives to a degree. And they make who we are more interesting and complex, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think this body of work, which is about the human condition through the lens of my experiences, is further influenced by global tensions and the resulting strain on society as a whole. While I live in a sheltered, safe little corner of the world, what’s happening elsewhere cannot be totally ignored.
The wood is cut from trees in my garden and stored along the fence-line, becoming an occasional shelter for birds and insects before being selected for sculpture. The history, character and vitality that each piece of wood carries is different, and influences how I say what I want.