Can you tell me something of your artistic back ground?
I went to the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. I began in 1977 and I was there for three years. During that time I was fortunate enough to have a number of key figures in the Australian art world lecturing there and it was a very free environment.
You were just allotted your own studio space and you were pretty much left to our own devices during that whole time, with ongoing really excellent feedback coming from the various lecturers, (in between their games of chess).
You ended up developing your own mode of working just with the encouragement of the lecturers. You had access to fabulous drawing facilities, sculpture, printmaking and photography and of course, the National Gallery of Victoria, which was right next door to us. In terms of any serious art education, that was really where I started.
I went on later to do a teaching degree, which supplemented my income at another point down the track. At first I was very keen to start working as a professional artist straight out of art school. That’s all I did for a number of years until I realised the reality of being an artist meant I had to supplement my income by other means.
When I was at the Victorian College of the Arts that was when I first started making things out of driftwood. The furniture in my house was completely made of driftwood, but for some reason or other it didn’t occur to me then to take it into a sculptural form other than furniture. It did at a later time. I think probably living in Byron Bay with the profound influence of living in a coastal area and having a response to my environment that just naturally led me back into these memories.
I moved back to the East Coast after living in Fremantle, near Perth in Western Australia for 6 years. I moved into a beautiful home in Byron Bay, that’s where I had the inspiration after a gap of fifteen years to make art and furniture out of driftwood. That’s also when I stumbled upon all these plastic.
