Bundanon

I am a queer multidisciplinary artist who trained as a painter at the ANU School of Art in Canberra. I also hold a Bachelor of Japanese Studies, and a PhD in visual art practice. My practice encompasses drawings, textiles, video and performative modes of practice and is nonetheless grounded in painting.

I have a fascination for ekphrastic art: works of art that are imagined in words only, especially those that appear in novels. I get absorbed in the human search for meaning as it manifests as fiction, oracles and storytelling. I also harbour an abiding love of non-objective art and abstraction. These things don’t seem consistent even to me, but I enjoy the apparent dissonance between them.

In Residence at Bundanon

For my project I will channel Hurtle Duffield, the fictional painter protagonist in ‘The Vivisector’ (1970) by Patrick White, to manifest the paintings and drawings imagined by White in the novel. White associated with Sidney Nolan and other artists of the time including Arthur Boyd.

I see ‘The Vivisector’ as White’s self-portrait as an artist. During my residency I aim to evaluate my own experience of art practice, as a queer woman, mother and someone who has not sacrificed everything to art as has Hurtle Duffield, posed as being a great driven genius of late modernism.