My paintings have always begun with what is close to me.

For a long time, that meant the domestic and the everyday — familiar objects, interiors, figures and small moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed. I was interested in what happened when those things were isolated and given the weight of a painting; how something ordinary could become intimate, funny, uncomfortable or unexpectedly beautiful.

That way of looking still sits at the centre of my practice, although what I’m looking at has begun to shift. Increasingly, I find myself turning to the landscape and life immediately around me in Western Australia — birds in the garden, native flora, seasonal fruit, light and the particular colours of this place.

At the same time, I’ve become increasingly interested in the language of historical painting, particularly still life. There is something compelling to me about placing these familiar Australian subjects into conversation with that tradition — borrowing from its richness, composition and sense of ceremony while keeping them firmly rooted in my own experience of place.

Perhaps the thread running through it all is attention. I’m interested in the details that make up a life — an expression, an object left on a table, a bird outside a window, a fleeting change in light — and in how easily these things can disappear into the everyday. Painting gives me a reason to stop and look more closely. Not only at what is beautiful, but at what is strange, tender, humorous, uncomfortable or simply there.

I’m a British-born painter living and working in Perth, Western Australia. I work primarily in oil, with colour, surface, edge and the physical presence of paint remaining central to the way each work develops.

I was Artist in Residence at Fremantle Arts Centre in 2023 and have exhibited in Glasgow, Leeds, London, Perth, Melbourne and Sydney.