I’m an Australian born, Berlin-based artist working across a range of mediums, from performance, printmaking, sculpture to drawing. However, I am trained as a painter – and this is my primary focus. Despite the different mediums, my work is connected by several recurring themes that form the foundations of my art practise.
I’m driven by somewhat of an obsessive investigation into the relationship between abstract systems and geometric forms. This exploration has extended into several spheres. My past series of works explored architecture and the built environment in Australia as a physical manifestation of colonialism. The imposition of the grid and geometric order on the landscape directly expressed the colonial idea of man’s God-given mastery over nature.
Currently, I’m developing paintings exploring the idea of information and systems mapping by blending the visual language of charts and graphs with a kind of quasi neo-suprematist geometry. I’m borrowing from the history of painting to explore a nostalgia we hold for 20th century rationalism and the modernist era of grand-narratives and universal truths, living now as we are in the age of relativism and ‘post truth’ politics. I am fascinated by the suprematists and the constructivists, and the way they viewed geometric painting as a pure form of socialist expression.
Mapping and line play significant roles in my work, as does the appropriation of symbols, numbers and other signifiers of information. Sometimes real geography or actual information is inserted into the map-like works, but much of the information is either false or is imagined.
Much of the work could be defined as conceptual mapping – however it is often unclear what exactly is being mapped; my intention is to create work that gives the appearance of mapping, without providing any actual direction. In this way, I am trying to reflect the ultimate contradiction of 21st century life – we are over-saturated in an abundance of data and information, and yet we remain poor in actual wisdom. For all the achievements of research and technology, we are nevertheless at the limits of our precious environmental resources. The future of our civilisation is in question. Indeed, if Jared Diamond and others are to be believed, we are in the final days of Rome.
The world seems to me to be infinitely more complex each day. Construction and production; unceasing, relentless. Images, data, consumer goods, information, money, lives – all shift around the corners of this global city in seconds.
I am driven by this one big complex idea that remains to be defined. My works are generally an attempt to get to the centre of this idea for the time being. Many artists only ever have one idea. This may be mine. But I’m young and the world changes. Perhaps it will soon be irrelevant?
This idea is like a swirling cosmos of thoughts all bouncing off each other- built space, cities, time, suburbs, houses, modernism, skyscrapers, bad printing, globalisation, architecture, entropy, ruins, privatisation, colonisation, geometry, the internet, line… it goes on and on.
