PRACTICE

My current work brings ceramics, painting, installation and sound together in an exploration of the continual movement between chaos and coherence.

I see this movement throughout life: in the turbulence of a storm, the devastation of war and the stillness found in meditation; and within ourselves, as we move between calm and agitation, connection and fragmentation, certainty and change. I am interested in coherence not as a fixed condition, but as something continually forming, dissolving and reorganising.

The landscape around Castlemaine gives these ideas a particular physical and historical presence. Here on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, in central Victoria, Australia, the earth carries many layers of memory. The gold rush brought enormous physical upheaval as land was dug through, displaced and reordered. It created extraordinary prosperity, while colonisation, dispossession and disruption of Country brought profound trauma to the Dja Dja Wurrung people.

Clay and gold carry these histories through the work. I think of clay as matter capable of holding memory: of the earth it comes from and of everything that subsequently happens to it. It records touch, pressure, marks and form; firing fixes these traces, while further firings, fractures, grinding, joining and repair add new layers to its history.

Gold carries both local and archetypal meaning. Here it speaks of prosperity, desire and wealth drawn from the earth, together with the upheaval that accompanied it. More broadly, gold has long suggested radiance, transformation, value, the sacred and the enduring. Where it appears within cracks and scarred surfaces, these meanings meet.

Geometry enters the work as a language of coherence. Forms including the Sri Yantra, Metatron's Cube and Flower of Life appear throughout the paintings and ceramics, often fragmented, distorted or partially obscured. I use these forms not as decoration or as a closed symbolic system, but as underlying structures within fields of movement. Even when disrupted, they suggest an organising principle within complexity: coherence present within, and emerging through, instability.

The ceramics embody these processes physically through clay, fire, fracture and transformation. The paintings explore them through shifting fields of colour, darkness, light and geometric form. Sound and vibration extend the work beyond the visible, with some pieces responding to the presence and movement of the viewer and bringing body, object and surrounding space into relationship.

Across the work, patterns form, dissolve and form again. Chaos and coherence become parts of the same continuing movement.