Painting is how I think out loud
For Charlie
This painting documents a real moment. A man, reunited with his dog after a period of hospitalisation. His wife had stabbed him. While he recovered, his dog was sent to the pound. This is the moment he got him back.
Charlie's story is not unusual. It is simply usually untold.
Domestic violence does not follow a single script. It moves through relationships of every kind, across genders, across sexualities, across the configurations that real human lives take. When we fix our language to a single story, we do not make that story less true. We make every other story harder to tell, harder to hear, and harder to survive.
This work is not a challenge to the experience of women who live with violence. It is an act of expansion, an insistence that if we are genuinely committed to seeing all people, we must build language and support broad enough to hold them.
For the women whose stories shaped this conversation. And for Charlie, and everyone whose story has no name yet.
Series: Seasonal Sessions
There is a particular kind of place that becomes a community before it becomes a business. A neighbourhood brewery where the bar staff know your name, where a Bernese Mountain Dog claims his favourite bench like a regular, where the light on the taps at the end of a session is worth stopping for.
Seasonal Brewing Company in Maylands is that kind of place. This series was painted entirely from moments that happened there; observed, documented, and translated into paint as an act of devotion to a place and the people who make it what it is.
Painted for my 2026 solo exhibition held at the brewery itself, these works are an invitation — to see a place you may not have visited yet, through the eyes of someone who kept coming back and couldn't stop noticing.
Series: Who wants to be an Instragirl?
hese three figures are not celebrities. They are archetypes, the girl with the phone, the girl performing for the lens, the girl who has learned that being seen is its own achievement. Painted in greyscale against raw gold, they are simultaneously elevated and flattened. Precious and disposable. Iconic and anonymous.
Who Wants to Be an Instagirl? asks what it costs to build a self in public and what gets lost when the image becomes the person.
Unpathed waters, undreamed shores
Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale
These three works began with paint and water and the decision to let go of control. Fluid acrylic poured and pulled across canvas, finding its own currents, its own depths, the artist's hand present but not dominant.
The result is water that has never existed and water that is entirely familiar. The movement of oceans. The moment before a wave breaks. The deep that holds both stillness and violence at once.
Painted as a triptych, the three works are designed to be read together, a single body of water seen from three different distances, or three different states of the same restless sea.
Portraits
Wirren Moorditj-abiny
Coming up for air
Wirren Moorditj-abiny — spirit growing stronger.
This portrait is of Ash (Garlett) Penfold, proud Noongar man and founder of Corroboree for Life, a community orgaAsh's own path to that work was not easy. Growing up, he experienced bullying, racism, family violence, depression, and suicidal ideation. What was missing, he came to understand, was a sense of belonging and a connection to culture. From that understanding, Corroboree for Life was born.
The title Coming Up for Air speaks to that moment of breaking the surface, the breath that comes after depression, after despair, after the long dark. The blue of the painting holds both the weight of what was survived and the lightness of what became possible. Ash is painted mid-dance, mid-breath, mid-becoming, culture not as something lost but as something fiercely, joyfully reclaimed.
This painting was made in witness and in respect.
nisation established in 2018 to give young Aboriginal people a place to connect with culture, build confidence, and find belonging.