Travelling or journeying has been a constant theme in my work. Earlier work looked at the journey across or through space as an external experience. The current work is a more internal, personalized take on that theme where as well as depicting a journey or track across the picture plane, I bury the history of the journey into the picture plane. Layers of semi-transparent oil paint are built up to a translucence that internally projects an inscribed visual memory of the journey.

Landscape and maps are a source for metaphor with which to code and decode the world. The perception of maps, in a Eurocentric context, as Cartesian representations of the grid include the implications associated with power, ownership and colonisation. However, maps also contain coded information in relation to topography, movement and inscribed spatial history. Nonetheless, the contemporary perception of land and landscape painting continues to be philosophically gridlocked by Euclidean or Cartesian space. It is artists such as Australian Aboriginal desert painters that lead the way out of this Cartesian gridlock with a symbolic language that depicts an active space that is above and beneath, behind and before.

In my own painting practice I bury the grid deep into the ground of the paintings and raise the perspective to the space above land where weather and climate act to shape it. It is in the meeting of ephemeral action (weather patterns) and the dense material of land where I explore philosophical questions of existence.

I look for analogous connections between the material universe and the spiritual domain and explore the significance of the material in art as a transformative medium. A search for analogous connections in the modern abstract art movement and indigenous art, in particular Australian desert painters, led to the discovery of philosophical similarities underpinning contemporary Aboriginal art and the modernist abstract movement. This research has shifted my painting practice to a position where I can open out to more diverse possibilities in the depiction of rhythm and movement in landscape.