120cm x 170cm

Acrylic on unstretched canvas

I am a Melbourne-based artist trained in Painting and Printmaking at Monash University.  My practice has long been anchored in the language of flowers as companions in understanding the shifting, cyclical nature of being a woman. Their colour, fragility and brief, brilliant lives echo the inner seasons I, myself, move through - the expansions, the shedding, the quiet renewals and returns. I am especially drawn to fully blown flowers for their unapologetic honesty; having lived a full life, now past their prime, they still have so much beauty and wisdom to offer.

My process is instinctive and deeply embodied. I dance while I paint to music, letting rhythm dissolve thought so intuition can take the lead. In that state, I’m not recording flowers so much as entering into dialogue with them. Colour becomes a way of feeling, gesture becomes a kind of remembering and the canvas becomes a place where the hidden, unguarded parts of myself can surface. Painting allows me to hold what is fleeting — tenderness, courage, joy, grief, self-acceptance — long enough to understand it.

A recent period spent in the country marked a turning point in my work. Surrounded by spring gardens and working in a makeshift studio, I found myself surrendering to a new freedom. Conducting my way across the canvas to Mozart’s Requiem and Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, I let go of the structures I once relied on and trusted the wildness of the mark. Every stroke felt essential: too few and the painting fell apart, too many and the balance dissolved. This tension between precision and abandon has become the heartbeat of my current practice.

My large-scale works are energetic, expressive and alive. The floral form remains, but it stretches and reforms into a vocab describing a kind of self-portrait, not of likeness but of experience: the softness and strength of womanhood, the undoing and the reclamation, the wildness and the grounded acceptance of self.