Little Creatures - 2018

Little Creatures were born out of the 2016 Ephemera Project on Black Gully in Armidale NSW and followed an invitation to exhibit in the Wharapuke Sculpture Park Gallery in Kerikeri, New Zealand. The work evolved quickly after the initial ground work during the Ephemera residency at NERAM in 2016. The work was carefully packed and posted to New Zealand mainly in deconstructed form. On arrival (uncomfortably close to opening night) the components were put together, often not in the way I initially envisaged, but in a way that made sense at the time.

Ephemera - November 2016

My work for Ephemera was a made in residence at the New England Art Museum (NERAM), Armidale NSW. The studio opened onto Black Gully, the site of recent extensive environmental restoration. My project utilised clay dug from the gully 30 meters from the studio. The clay was processed by hand to remove the larger rocks and sticks, then mixed with native plant seed collected by local botanists from in and around Black Gully. The work was made and placed in its raw form back on the banks of Black Gully. Within a few days the rains came and began to break the clay back down into the soil along with the seeds. Later in the summer the first signs of germination appeared. Only wattle species germinated. Now in 2025 some of these specimens are over 4 meters high.

Willow Bowers - 2019

During the 1990s I did an artist in residence at the University of Southern Indiana in the US. During that time I travelled around a few universities in Indiana giving guest lectures and talking with students about their work. At Indiana University in Indianapolis I happened upon a large willow bower and happened to meet its maker, Patrick Dougherty. The memory of this chance encounter stayed with me. Back in Australia many years later I became involved in the celebration of the Black Gully Creek restoration adjacent to the New England Art Museum in Armidale. In 2013 or so I built some minor willow bowers from willow cut from Black Gully and from the dam at the back of the Mike O’Keefe Woodland Centre for the Black Gully Festival in that year. In collecting willow from the dam I stepped from a floating willow pad, missed the bank and went up to my arm pits in sticky mud. Cleaning myself off, I made the mental note that the mud felt very much like clay. This became pivotal later in using Black Gully clay for the Ephemera project in 2016.

Leading up to the 2019 Black Gully Festival I embarked on a larger bower, cutting many trailer loads of willow from up and down Black Gully. With a few helpers we embarked on the construction of a modest willow bower.

Fibonacci Project - 2024

Concrete stencilling and mosaic collaboration with Guy Crosley - Uralla NSW

Uralla’s Fibonacci Park Project came about from Kent Mayo recognising that Uralla’s postcode is the only postcode in Australia to have 4 consecutive numbers from the Fibonacci sequence, 2, 3, 5, 8.

I have been working in collaboration with park concept designer and mosaic artist Guy Crosley from the Mid North Coast to bring the creative elements of the park to life. We started in October 2023 laying the 100m concrete path, completing the path in February 2024.

The next phase was to start the mosaic work on the four scaled standing pillars highlighting the sequence 2, 3, 5 and 8. The pillars feature muralised pictorial mosaic scenes on one side and geometric representations of Fibonacci themes on the other. The edges and tops of the pillars feature tile images designed by Christine Ball, long term friend and Uralla potter. The tiles depict a portrait image of the twelfth century Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci and Uralla’s postcode numbers in eight different language scripts.

Concrete path construction

Steel and zinc stencils and stamps adapted from local children’s drawings by local fabricator and artist Rick Tait.

Stencils designed by Guy and fabricated by Rick Tait laid onto the wet concrete.

One of the first completed sections of path. Each day we would complete a 10 meter section.

Neo Crosley and Ellis Bell artist collaborators on the path.

Section of completed path after turf laid.

Path complete prior to mosaics.

Mosaic pillar construction

Glaze tests laid out for analysis

Guy settles into making large panel

I start to lay out geometric 2 panel

Guy surveys mid point of painting panel

Guy and I start paper facing large geometric panel

Completed pictorial face of pillars

Completed geometric face of pillars

Spin, Constellation of the South Sculpture Project - 2024

Project in Uralla, NSW.

The Constellations of the South was a project conceived and begun back in the late nineties by the, now, late Charlie Rudd and sculptor Carl Merten. The project lapsed and was picked back up after Charlie’s death.

I was commissioned to develop a maquette for a sculpture for the project in late 2023 based on my concept for ‘Spin’ and selected and subsequently commissioned to fabricate the work.

'Spin' is a sculpture based on the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, located in the Hydra constellation. The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy is known for its bright and distinct spiral arms and its high rate of star-forming activity. The galaxy has many young, hot, and massive stars, as well as regions of glowing hydrogen gas where new stars are being born contributing to its overall brightness. The swirling texture on the surface of 'Spin' eludes to this activity. The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy provides astronomers with a valuable target for detailed observation of the processes of galaxy formation, evolution, and the ultimate death of stars. It is visible from Earth with binoculars or small telescopes. The classical spiral formation of the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy made it a stand out choice as the basis for the concept of ‘Spin’.