the epic secret life of the mundane

My Work has always been concerned with describing a sense of place and producing objects that have their own life and can exist outside the constraints of a label, such as landscape painting. They are not direct representations of places that I visit and see every day, nor are they abstract. The most successful of my paintings have an uneasy edge between that of the figurative scene and the pure pattern or colour.

I have always lived amongst farmland and have known the people that make a living from it, since I was a child. My paintings are worked and laboured over just as the soil and crops have been worked and plotted. They are scraped back or layered, constantly evolving and never really completed. The ones that work are kept and the others are pushed into shape or removed.

The exhibition title, the epic secret life of the mundane, comes from a line from a Bruce Dawe poem. Most things go unnoticed and happen every moment, they are the mundane events of life that we all live through. They are what makes up each day. A pattern in a field, the colour of a crop and the tyre marks in a paddock are all mundane but at the same time epic.