Sea Country Solo Exhibition
Sea Country Solo Exhibition
Oleo gel & oil paint on belgian linen
76cm x 51cm
$1000
This painting articulates the ocean’s paradox: simultaneously ravishing and ruthless, it summons the viewer toward its hidden recesses with an almost magnetic pull, drawing the eye and the imagination into depths that are both alluring and forbidding. It is a deliberate entreaty to safeguard the marine realm, a quiet but urgent reminder that aesthetic splendor and vulnerability are inextricably intertwined, and that our inquisitiveness must be tempered and guided by responsible stewardship and thoughtful action.
Beyond the immediate visual seduction — the way light fractures and recombines beneath waves, the palette of deep ultramarines and sudden phosphorescent flashes — the work functions as a moral landscape. Each brushstroke suggests not only a shape or motion but a ledger of consequences: currents that ferry life and plastic alike, shoals that once teemed with abundance now rendered skeletal by overfishing, coral ridges painted in colors so vivid they almost ache because one knows many real corals are bleaching into ghostly paleness. The painting’s textured surfaces insist on tactility; they call to mind the roughness of barnacle-encrusted hulls, the sleek sheen of a sharks flank, the abrasive scrape of sand on fins. Those textures are a tactile memory of what is being lost and what remains to be preserved.
Equally important is what the composition withholds. Dark pockets and obscured forms hint at ecosystems we barely comprehend: bioluminescent realms where unfamiliar creatures flicker; abyssal plains where slow, strange lives proceed in silence. That sense of mystery cultivates humility. The piece refuses simplistic triumphalism; it does not offer a consoling narrative of recovery. Instead it insists that beauty is fragile and contingent. The ocean’s drama unfolds on a geological and ecological timescale that resists instant solutions, so the painting becomes a call for patient, persistent care — for policies informed by science, for fisheries managed by long-term quotas, for coastal development that anticipates sea-level rise rather than courting short-term profit.
Viewer response is an integral part of the work’s ethical program. By drawing people in with visual allure, it creates a space for reflection: how we consume seafood, how we dispose of waste, how we vote and advocate for conservation. The painting’s emotional charge translates to potential action when paired with knowledge and community effort. It suggests partnerships — between artists and scientists, between local stewards and global institutions — that can translate sensitivity into measurable improvement. Education programs, citizen-science networks, restoration projects for kelp forests and mangroves: these are the concrete counterparts to the painting’s elegiac beauty.
Finally, the artwork insists on reciprocity. The ocean nourishes humanity in countless ways, and the painting asks that our curiosity be repaid not with extraction alone but with repair. To stand before it is to accept responsibility: to treat the sea not as an inexhaustible backdrop to human ambition but as a living collaborator whose future depends on informed, compassionate action. In that sense, the painting is both mirror and map — reflecting our present failings while pointing toward a route of stewardship that honors the ocean’s splendor and protects its precarious life.
A Meeting of old Friends
Oil & Oleo gel on Belgian linen
76cm x 76cm
$1500
This painting explores the reunion of old friends who gather after time spent apart, each carrying new experiences and unfamiliar chapters. The silhouetted white pointer shark serves as a central symbol: at once an intruder and an emblem, it embodies the uncanny presence of change — sleek, purposeful, and unknowable beneath a placid surface. Its blank, pale form suggests both memory and blank pages: traces of what once was, and the unread possibilities that now swim between them.
Compositional choices emphasize the tension between familiarity and distance. Figures are arranged in a loose circle, their gestures tentative but affectionate; gaps between them imply histories that no longer align perfectly. Light falls unevenly, revealing details in some faces while leaving others half in shadow, suggesting selective recall and the deliberate withholding of past pains. Textural contrasts — rough, weathered brushwork for worn clothing against smoother, luminous strokes around the shark — heighten the sense that the friends carry different wear from their separate journeys.
Color is restrained, favoring muted earth tones to anchor the scene in shared history, punctuated by the shark’s muted blue that’s done to almost blend it to the horizon that shows that its there but not enough to focus in the friendship or painting draw the eye. This whiteness is ambiguous: it can read as innocence regained, a blank slate that permits reinvention, or as a void that cannot be fully known. The shark’s directionality — a subtle forward tilt — hints at momentum: the future moves through the reunion, shaping conversation and testing old bonds.
Symbolic elements scattered through the setting reinforce individual stories. A folded map, frayed at the edges, lies near one figure, indicating travel and rerouted plans; a small, sealed envelope near another suggests untold confessions; a glass half-empty on a low table signals tempered celebration. None of these objects dominate; they are fragments that invite speculation, much like the moments of disclosure that surface when friends reconnect.
The painting resists closure. There is no tidy reconciliation or complete estrangement. Instead, it captures an intermediate state: recognition shaded by new rhythms of life, the awkward recalibration of roles. The pointer shark remains both a guardian and a riddle — a steady presence that marks the meeting as altered by absence, and a reminder that reunions are seldom a return to the exact past but rather an encounter with altered selves navigating shared memory.
Migration Buddies
76cm x 76cm
Oil and oleogel on Belgian linen
$1,500
This painting summons contemplation of the concealed odysseys that unfold beneath the ocean’s surface. The sea pulses with migration—monumental journeys undertaken by whales, synchronous currents of fish, the deliberate routes of sea turtles, and the imperceptible drift of plankton—each movement governed by ancestral instincts, gradients of temperature, and the cadence of tides. These trajectories are more than biological phenomena; they constitute intricate ecological dialogues, interlaced strategies of persistence and interdependence that help determine planetary well-being. Through stratified textures and sinuous, aqueous forms, the work endeavors to render the rhythm, enigma, and vastness of marine migration, inviting the viewer to consider not only who moves, but the deeper forces and meanings that compel their passage.
Camp site Beneath the waves
76cm x 76cm
Oil and oleogel on Belgian linen
$1500
This painting considers the notion of a refuge that is not quite domicile but closely akin to it: an interim intimacy. It might be a friend’s worn sofa, a quiet park bench beneath an unassuming tree, a tucked-away corner of a café, or a familiar street at dusk suffused with amber light. Such modest, everyday settings are where we permit ourselves to exhale—where posture loosens, breath slows, and we are quietly acknowledged without the need for explanation. Through nuanced handling of light, layered texture, and attentive, intimate detail, the work invites contemplative attention to those understated sanctuaries in our lives: places that cradle us gently and reliably, offering solace and small certainties even when they do not legally belong to us.
Expanding on that core idea, the painting seeks to honor the provisional — the fleeting but recurring places that accumulate personal meaning over time. These are not grand architectures of memory or the ceremonious rooms of family life, but rather the small loci of habit and comfort. The friend’s sofa carries the sag of countless evenings, the faint halo of a lamp has learned the contour of a favorite book’s spine, and the café corner remembers the precise rhythm of someone’s coffee orders. The work does not attempt to narrate specific events; instead it records the aggregate impression of repeated returns, the gentle looping of presence that transforms anonymity into tacit belonging.
Light operates here as a principal narrator. It falls in ways that suggest both temporal specificity and emotional valence: the cool, dappled shifts of morning that make a windowsill into a small theater for dust motes; the warm, low sweep of late afternoon that gilds a pavement and seems to slow the world. Through subtle gradations the painting tracks how light softens edges, blurs the barrier between inside and outside, and renders ordinary textures luminous. Brushwork that favors layered translucency and thin glazing allows these light effects to breathe, suggesting air and time as much as surface.
Texture and material detail function as a kind of language of intimacy. The frayed edge of upholstery, the chalky residue on a bench, the condensation ring left by a cup — these are the particularities that the viewer can almost feel. They are tactile cues that imply histories of use and the human presence that made them familiar. Attention to such details invites viewers into a slow visual rhythm: to linger, to recognize, to recall their own provisional refuges.
Compositional choices resist dramatic contrasts and grand gestures; instead the painting settles into restrained harmonies. Lines are quiet, colors are tempered, and perspective often favors a near, slightly offset vantage—like the angle from which one watches someone else relax, unselfconscious. This closeness without intrusion reinforces the theme of interim intimacy: proximity that respects autonomy.
Ultimately the work registers how these non-domicile refuges perform an essential emotional labor. They provide maintenance for the self — small rituals of recovery, places to recalibrate mood and thought, sites where identity can be temporarily unmade and remade. By portraying them with care, the painting affirms that belonging need not always be formalized; it can be accrued in small returns, in the repetition of small comforts. These modest sanctuaries, though provisional, are no less vital: they are the quiet infrastructure of lived resilience.
Mother and child arrive to the campsite
(sold)
76cm x 76cm
Oil and oleogel on Belgian linen
$1,500
In this painting I examine the subtle, layered dynamics of motherhood through the emblem of the leopard shark. Though these sharks do not tend their young after hatching, they instinctively deposit their eggs in sheltered, secure sites. I have extended that natural behavior into a hypothetical gesture: the imagined “mother shark” who, without direct caregiving, guides the next generation to appropriate places for laying eggs—transmitting practical knowledge rather than providing continual nurture. The work considers maternal strength as quiet and measured, a protective instinct expressed through foresight and placement rather than immediacy. It evokes a lineage of tacit wisdom, a restrained but potent inheritance that readies successors for survival from afar.
Divided Distractions
Oil and oleogel on Belgian linen
This painting offers a subtle admonition: excessive activity is not synonymous with well-being. Amid the hurried cadence of a crowded week we too readily neglect the simple acts of pausing, inhaling, and inhabiting the present. The composition’s stratified planes and interlaced gestures register the pressures of over-scheduling—convergent shapes, agitated linework, and dissonant chromatic passages—yet its true power resides in a concealed locus of calm. There, an uncontrived expanse of stillness anchors the eye, suggesting that equilibrium can be found not through ceaseless motion but through deliberate repose. The work invites a measured deceleration, an ethical allowance for rest, and the recognition that productivity need not be the sole metric of value.
Solo Exhibition @ Saltwater Freshwater Gallery Coffs Harbour “Sea Country”
My Debut Solo Exhibition will be from the 5th of July 2025 to 16th of August. With the opening on the 10th of July from 4:00pm to 6:00pm. Absolutely everyone is welcome! I would love to meet new people and discuss the exhibition with and art in general.
Discover the compelling journey of my artistic vision at my Debut Solo Exhibition, Sea Country, running from July 5th to August 16th, 2025. This exhibition presents a unique opportunity to experience fresh, original works that explore the deep connection between land, sea, and culture.
Join us for the special opening event on July 10th, from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm—an inviting space designed for art lovers, curious minds, and new connections alike. Whether you are an experienced collector, an art enthusiast, or simply someone looking to be inspired, this exhibition offers a meaningful encounter with art that reflects contemporary experiences within the natural environment.
I warmly welcome everyone to engage, ask questions, and share perspectives, fostering a community where art becomes a catalyst for conversation and connection. Your presence will not only support emerging talent but also enrich your appreciation and understanding of the creative process.
Mark your calendar, bring your curiosity, and step into a world where art and dialogue intersect. Together, let’s celebrate the power of creativity to inspire, challenge, and unite.