Paintings

Much of my work uses landscape as a way of investigating ideas around place. Landscape has a long and rich history within Western art and its conventions are well understood. While the weight of this history and tradition means that landscapes now have to work hard to avoid the formulaic, it also provides the opportunity to play with iconography and style to draw readings beyond a simple record of place.

Rather than the traditional landscape view – the spectacular, the sublime or the picturesque - my images are of ordinary places. Sometimes I draw in charcoal and pale washes to emphasise the unremarkable nature of places that are often overlooked. More recently I have begun painting brightly-coloured landscapes with a decidedly kitsch and digitalised feel to them. While these works have their feet planted in standard notions of the picturesque, these are also places that are so familiar they could be every place, yet be no place in particular at the same time. By focusing on the ordinary or everyday places, I want to draw attention to what we do with all our land, not just the small pockets of spectacular scenery amongst the paddocks and the tracts of housing. My environmental concerns are especially focused on the dairy industry, and I have done a number of works based around this theme. While dairying has been good for New Zealand, I'm not sure we want to turn the whole country into a dairy farm. If we continue with unsustainable farming practices, endless subdivisions for housing sprawl, and exploitation of resources at any cost we will lose everything that we value about New Zealand and our place in the world.

As well as the physical sense of place, and how we manage that, I am interested in place in a political or social sense. The stability of place is under threat all around the world from war, environmental catastrophe, the virtual world of cyberspace, and economic globalisation. This uncertain ground of place is the focus of my work.