I grew up in Melbourne and studied painting at the Australian National University in Canberra before spending a decade working in the fashion industry. It took an ordinary moment, light falling across flowers in a florist's window during a lunch break, to interrupt all of that. Something shifted. I moved to New Zealand in 2016 and have been painting and living here ever since.

I live and work in Ōtepoti Dunedin in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, and my practice centres on two subjects: flowers and clouds. Both are studies in light, texture, and impermanence. The cloud paintings came after my move to New Zealand. They made me think about distance, about the air and water between me and home, about what it means to belong to a place. 

What started as a long held fascination with light and texture has become an obsession with why we love flowers, and how they pull on our senses in ways we don't always expect. I find them extraordinary, not always in an obvious way. It's the smaller, quieter things: the way a petal curls at its edge, the subtle shift from one colour to another within a single bloom, the way light catches a leaf differently depending on the hour. In a world where it's far easier to notice something loud, these things can slip past entirely. They feel worth slowing down for, worth capturing, worth sharing. Not because they're perfect, they're not, and those imperfections are what I find most captivating. I use flowers as a mirror, to think about what we value, what we notice, and what we neglect.

I work at a large scale deliberately. I want to make these quiet things dramatic and impossible to ignore. The process begins long before the canvas: chasing clouds or working with a florist, photographing & finding the composition through the lens before I ever pick up a brush. The painting itself is slow, built up across months in layers of oil on linen. By the final layers I usually put the reference away entirely. At that point the question isn't whether it looks like the photograph. It's whether it works as a painting.

 I am one of those people who does tend to rush things, but in my studio I am able to be slow and deliberate. In a world where some days it feels everything moves too quickly: flowers wilt, phones ring, clouds disperse; an artwork has the ability to stand still.