I was born in Melbourne, Australia. When I was 10 years old the family moved to Perth on the west coast. Today a city of about one million people, Perth remains the most isolated capital city in the world. Growing up in Western Australia, separated from most of the world by the Indian Ocean in front and the Australian deserts at my back, I remained mesmerized by the thin shining strip of beach that seemed to mark the boundary of the world. The vivid light and vast horizons of this sparsely populated coastal plain formed the basis of my visual lexicon. As I documented this space in my work I became increasingly preoccupied with the impact of manmade objects on the otherwise open vistas of Western Australia.

I moved to Texas in 1994. Downtown Houston is a far cry from those coastal suburbs of Perth, but has been a powerful artistic inspiration, tying in perfectly to my interest in the human impact on our visual environment. From the first, I was impressed by the dramatic freeway structures, the utterly flat landscape and the diffused quality of the light.

I experience an enormous sense of personal dislocation from the natural world living in a big city, but there is still a relationship to this environment we have created. Giving visual form to the tension between this sense of relationship and dislocation has preoccupied me since I started making art.

As a society, our concepts of beauty are conditioned by images of pristine natural wilderness. At the same time, in the quest for convenience and development, structures like freeways and power lines tear at our landscapes with indifference. The search for inspiration in a cluttered, mundane world sometimes leads our gaze upward. In my “Breathing Space” series, the void of the sky, framed by glimpses of natural and man-made artifacts, becomes the focus of an inchoate yearning, providing space for escape and a point of contact with the natural world.

In 2007 I moved to St John’s Newfoundland. In dramatic contrast to Houston this is a community with profound physical and cultural connections to the land. The landscape is inviting, picturesquely beautiful and accessible. Personal and social histories reflect this relationship. It is one of those places on the planet where I feel deeply connected and inspired. How this manifests in my artwork remains to be seen.