I regularly publish visual art-focused critiques that contribute to current thought by examining and reflecting on the changing relationships between humans and nature. My key project, Birds & Language, is an extension of this research and has involved making abstract bird sculptures and working in cross-disciplinary and inclusive ways.

Through Birds & Language, I bring together artists, thinkers and conservationists, providing an opportunity to build grounds for a cross-disciplinary encounter between the natural sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts. I lead research in unique fusions of linguistics, ornithology, evolutionary theory, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, music, and so on, extending and challenging existing hierarchies and moving the parameters of visual art practice into exciting new transdisciplinary ways of working.

These bird projects have included:

• A two-day Birds and Language Conference hosted by USyd SACE (co-convened with Ian Maxwell) with international and national attendees and presenters. The two days concluded with an online pop-up exhibition (due to COVID-19 restrictions). The conference and exhibition were an enormous success, with significant external reach: 346+ registrations and 70 in attendance (two days). From Darwin to Tasmania, 20 writers and 20 artists contributed to this national event.
• A major exhibition, Birds and Language, at one of NSW’s largest regional art museums, Wollongong Art Gallery, supplemented by special events and accompanied by a 15-page colour catalogue (print), which included my 2800-word critical curatorial essay about 21 artists, previewed in Artist Profile Magazine.
• Following this, Jen Valender and I edited a ‘Birds and Language’ edition of Unlikely – Journal for Creative Arts. Unlikely is run by The University of Melbourne and is a prestigious transdisciplinary journal, which aims to open unexpected spaces for artistic exchange and scholarly conversations across mediums, disciplines and continents (Issue 08). We published 17 double-blind peer-reviewed scholarly essays and 14 media-rich creative research projects in the Project Space.

My bird artworks are an ongoing diary of sorts, and belong to significant public collections: Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; the University of Queensland Art Museum; the University of Wollongong Art Collection and the Queensland Children’s Hospital. In these sculptures painted with encaustic wax, abstract images of birds primarily spotted in Australia are squeezed or trapped into the rectilinear architecture of empty Tetra Paks. The resulting expressionist distortions – angular in shape as determined by the cartons – are half bird and half cultural object, suggesting the continual commodification of nature, a world gradually destroying itself, and the transformation of rubbish. In capitulating to the cartons’ open spouts, the birds embody the phantasmatic property of everyday materials replete with associative meanings of myth and consumerism. Two modes of identity – birds/cartons and art / consumer material – are sustained simultaneously in a single object.

From an art-historical perspective, the planes of colour recall the work of Color Field painter Ellsworth Kelly who attributes his minimal colour abstractions and the titles of his works to birdwatching as a young boy with his grandmother. Yet, in contrast to the restraint of formalist colour field painting, these birds might be said to return abstraction to its counterpart in nature, producing effects whereby the different permutations of colour and combinations of form embrace diversity, visual analogy and the aesthetic quality of these remarkable animals. The category depends on the intersection of birds that are seen and are therefore made, but their squashed states also suggest a crisis – those endangered, betrayed or disappeared.

The works in Diversity and Demise: Encounters with pelagic forms and sub-linguistic forms advances my research with respect to typographical forms by learning from documentation I have made of Peruvian and Mexican art. Forms evolve within the order of geometric patterns. This new compositional method is a significant shift in my work, allowing me to depict narratives as though they are part of a complex geometric iconographic system. The works test typographic abstraction, sublinguistic forms and display.

While painting remains core, my practice is enhanced by interrelationships with other mediums. For instance, my approach to figurative abstraction can be seen in the architectonic forms of my bird sculptures, whose bodies are determined by distorted Tetra Paks. Increasingly, I critique painting as a form of knowledge that refers to itself and questions its own limits.

The Trawler 2017
The Trawler is a portrait of human identity and hunger for power. The central figure, shown commanding the space, is an awkward giant with arms that terminate in fishhooks. Her head – a crane that bows clumsily and shamefully over her colossal body – denotes the utilitarian mentality of industrialised fishing, or any factory farming for that matter. Certain geometry abides. Scintillating blocks of colour accumulate throughout her monumental torso, encoding a human face. The motif of the face is repeated, but with each repetition increasingly erased. Around her figure, squares and diamonds form the foundation for ascending albatross. In the background, fishing vessels composed of flat blocks are inspired by artist Kazimir Malevich’s approach to abstraction. My approach to geometric abstraction also recalls the different colour combinations and permutations in the textile iconography of Cusco, Peru, and formally connects to my bird sculptures. The fishing vessel at the top of the painting is based on an image of the Atlantic Dawn, weighing 14 055 tones was the world’s biggest factory trawler to plunder African fish stocks in 2003.

Port Kembla 2016
Port Kembla is a bleak image of the Port Kembla steelworks in which coke ovens, steel-making buildings, stacks, a conveyer gallery and billowing steam serve as structural devices of confinement for abstract figures. At night, gas flares tint the hazy sky peach-pink. A couple convey my perceptual experience of this unique architectural space. With flat square heads carved out of a single brushstroke, the couple possess a haunted air, as if existing solely to inhabit the border that separates real dramatic industry and painted space. Their surreal partnership is watched by a solitary figure. Abstract wedges mirror the perspectival extremes in this inspiring architecture. I love its measured eccentricity and archaic beauty.

In these works, inspired by a trip to the Kimberley, the crevice functions in a number of conceptual ways; the form of the crevice lends shape to the split, and the dialectic of the split – a term that implies rupture and limitation – is expressed initially through this form. The vertical natural walls of a crevice correspond to built walls; as a site conflating the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’, they suggest the cultural structures that enclose us and dictate our paths (such as money and finite resources).

Since landscape is the locus upon which we form our collective memory – both the expression of our romanticised national identity and shared history of colonial exploitation – the depiction of the Australian landscape is a site of contestation, being the interface of human activity and exploitation.