At first, coming from the discipline of having been a painter for so many years, I envisioned my first series as wall works, plastics behind Perspex in shallow boxes, which looked remarkably similar to oil paintings when seen from a distance. From those early days of making these wall based assemblages, the whole process orientation took shape which was to guide me through many twists and turns in my creativity, which had me exploring many mediums in the found object genre including sculpture, installation, public art, digital printing and a return to painting.
For approximately fifteen years I scoured Australian beaches for found objects – the ocean litter that affects our waters and beaches on a global scale. Sorting all of these objects became a natural extension of my process of collecting. Gathering plastics from the beach was a type of performance art on its own. The new colors and shapes – hues and forms I had never seen before revealed themselves to me again as they accumulated in my studio, asking to be recollected but this time in the form of environmental artwork.
As a young artist, I was fortunate enough to interact with many people who played a significant role in shaping the Australian contemporary art world. During my studies at the Victorian College of the Arts I had the opportunity to meet significant Australian artists like Fred Williams, Roger Kemp and my drawing teacher Noel Counihan.
These and other lecturing artists, including Gareth Sansom, Allan Mittelman and the late Paul Partos, demonstrated to me what it meant to have an energetic response to the creative process. In terms of my own desires and ambitions, when I was young I didn’t especially see art making as being a part of my life, or at least as an integral part of my life. I enjoyed my youth, I enjoyed sport and I enjoyed the usual things of a young boy growing up and didn’t have a big picture of what it was that I wanted to become later in life.
One of my early girlfriends was involved with the diving industry through her father being a diver I developed a leaning towards the field of marine biology, which interested me to no end. I anticipated going to university and learning how to become a marine biologist, which I thought would involve me spending a significant amount of time diving in beautiful locations.
