_______ Trepidation
2020
Five Walls Gallery, Melbourne

You can feel it but you’re unsure
There’s something shifting through the layers and pulling you off balance.
Swaddled in a thin sheet of silk, bound so tightly around your body that you cannot move ...
Maybe I’ll stay here for a bit.

_______ Trepidation draws on the relationships between contemporary emotive, intuitive and reactionary responses to art and to life. Each painting has been developed steadily over the last months of 2019 and early months of 2020. Intertwining themes of fear and anxiety in response to personal trepidations, the urgency of climate change, the beginning of COVID-19, along with feelings of deep love and admiration. These paintings examine emotion in a contemporary practice through the abstract language, and I am investigating the Self through the layering of surfaces.

Intentionally leaving the first word of the exhibition title blank allows reactions to the show to be more open and undecided. It additionally gives the audience an opportunity to decide on a word, or phrase that they see fits in with them and their experience to the show.

My practice integrates saturated and loud colours with bold lines and geometry, often playing with darkness and light, hard lines and scribbles. At first the paintings can seem quite singular and disconnected from one another, however there is consistent overlapping of thinking, with direct links to methods of making, form and conception.