Chance Upon Nothing 2013

Solo exhibition 7th March 2013 until Sunday 7th April [MARS] GALLERY 418 Bay Street, Port Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

See MEDIA page for Opening Address by Emeritus Professor Richard Perry and essay by Dr. Sophie Knezic

Artist Statement:
In all my work I seek the means to reflect the world that we cannot restrain or affect – so as to better understand the relative unimportance of the world perceived only via our constructs or bias – one in which I nevertheless appear to quite contentedly reside!

Paint floats on the surface of a fluid onto which I place my paper and take a (mono) print of the result. But there the similarity with marbling ends for I ensure that I do not have the control of the paint on the surface. That is my wild horse.

I let the paint do the painting – like a jockey lets their horse do the galloping. I am a jockey on a wild horse and I cannot tell which way it is going to run.

But just as a scientist does not know the result he/she will expose, he/she or I do not rely on chance. Like the scientist I have created parameters for my horses, and within those I make my discoveries.

In these works, when I drop my paper on the bath the horse is still running amok through the environments of our lives or minds. The paper takes a snapshot of this heaving mass, momentarily stilling it, but the pressures and movement remains apparent.

The light shapes are without paint for they were once objects, like myself, floating in the environments of the surface of the bath – and have been pushed into their present location by the forces of the paints as they expand and contract. They have ended up in a different location from which they started, and not necessarily the one in which they intended to be.

For me, they are metaphors on whatever level for the environment in which we try to locate our desires, or make plans and expectations in the course of our lives – and sometimes kid ourselves we have achieved it, or even had any control at all.