The metamorphosis foregone & lovers series

Works on paper

The figurative forms in these works are metaphorical fusions of elements in the natural environment of the east coast of Australia, where I live. It is an environment of ocean coastlines, subtropical rain forests and remains of timeless volcanic ranges. And it has a history of white colonisation that is just short of 250 years. The tensions in the  figurative compositions I produce are deeply ambivalent. 

Two-thousand-year-old Antarctic Beech Trees in a forest near where I live have been battered into their current gnarled and twisted regrowth forms by untold numbers of cyclones. They are genetically related to a line of trees that once grew on a continent that is now the Antarctic.  The rock platforms and profiles of exposed metamorphic and volcanic rock and sandstone on the Pacific Coast are constant yet slowly eroding as the seas and oceans pound them for time immemorial. Endless day and night skyscapes cover and surround Australia- the largest island and the smallest continent on Earth.

The metamorphosis of these twisted and writhing, contorted and dancing, marching and performing, individual and multiple groupings are descriptions of narratives that also have a social and cultural context. I identify them as simultaneously primal and modern – the paradox of then and now. And a parody of the human condition – beautiful and grotesque, harmony and chaos and, above all, poignant and profound.

I see these painted works as forms of writing on a blank piece of paper. They are actual and rhetorical figures of Speech.