Over a period of nearly fifty years I have exhibited my photography.  Of all that work I feel that my most significant art has been evolving since 2010 when I experienced a deeper connection with the natural environment where I live in the Adelaide Hills.

For those who saw my first solo show of this period in 2012 and have followed the development of my ideas through the three diverse solo shows I had in 2015, and my Visions show last year at Worth Gallery, this show extends that evolution.

The personal revelation I mentioned generated a great inner excitement and stimulated the desire to express this new perception in my art.  The question of how to represent this was not an easy one. In my early attempts to answer this question I opened myself to all answers, however exciting or uncomfortable.  Through this process I opened the door to a deeper involvement with my own imagination. 

It was a found, figurative, section of a tree branch, that triggered this change in my perception.  Found objects have continued to be my primary source of inspiration.  In the process of finding ways of photographing these objects I changed from working outside to working inside, in my studio.  With this move my emphasis also changed to predominantly making images rather than taking them.

A piece in the this show, Tall Trees and Mountains Unite the Earth and the Heavens, culminated my early struggle to represent my new vision.  This artwork, from black & white negatives, was exhibited in the 2016 Fleurieu Prize.  Psychologically it has become the benchmark from which I judge my subsequent work.

I continue to remain open to working concurrently with a few idea-threads.  This show comprises three idea threads that each represent works in progress.  Progress with one thread often leads to new works in another thread.  Newly found objects tend to generate further image-ideas for a particular thread or they may suggest the beginning of a totally new idea-thread.

Currently, the most active of the three threads is the series On My Father's Drawing Board.  Dad purchased the board in the late 1930s when he was an art student.  The board was part of my childhood, and I used it occasionally when I also became an art student.  My montages on the board, made both in the studio and in the field, interact with my father's marks.  My father died in 2014 at 93 so, in a sense, these works are a collaboration.  Emotionally, this connection, is quite important to me.

In the late 1970s, I began travelling around Australia and around the world visiting First Nation rock art sites.  For me these are sacred places.  Those experiences have influenced my personal views and my images that suggest the sacred.  For me there is a strong connection between what is sacred and Nature in the broadest sense.

I have an artist residency with the Palaeontology Department headed by Professor Aaron Camens at Flinders University.  The intensity of the materials there, and the contact with dead animals, inspired Dance and Crouching Bird.  These two images also suggested, On My Father's Drawing Board: Relatives, where I indicate the sequence of lives and deaths that have led to me, and all living beings, being here.