Art helps you to transform. I’ve gone through several distinct phases in my career, creating a diverse body of work. The following factors are what led me to change my approach.
Art helps, in part, by building bridges to expanded consciousness. But art helps also when it destroys that to which you cling too tightly. And art helps most when it burns you right down to the bones, as it did to me.
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A fire destroyed my studio in 1983, taking seven years work with it. It shook my foundations as a person and brought me face to face with my mortality. It influenced my transition through a fairly diverse range of art practice and made the later transition to found objects easier, because I became less rigid as a person.
After many years of painting, I became more open to exploring new materials and technology, and to stretching myself beyond the realm of paintbrush and canvas. Being open to the benefit of ‘accidents’ in the art-making process has led to some of the most profound breakthroughs in my work. My creative medium changed to found object art after one such ‘accident’ in 1997. I was collecting driftwood on a remote Victorian coastline, planning to make furniture, when I stumbled on vast amounts of plastic ocean debris. A whole new palette of colour and shape revealed itself.
