Circumstance Relocation to Western Australia following my husband’s work. Caring for two small children in a landscape that unsettled and inspired. The harsh contrast between ultra-modern urban living and prehistoric, indifferent landscape — magpies, red earth, vast space — produced a disorientation that became the ground for the work.
Method Sketchbook studies gathering observations of place. Collages constructed from aspirational living imagery — cut, repasted, painted over — making visible the conflict between the natural world and modern domestic life. Painting happened in a spare room and during craft sessions run by church groups with crèches. Children and magpies appeared repeatedly because they were everywhere — in my life and in the landscape.
Materials Sketchbooks, cardboard, found imagery, acrylic paint, canvas.
Collaborators International mothers’ groups who held space — literally and otherwise — so that work could be made. Women who recognised the significance of what I was producing, both to me and to themselves.
Reflection Away from the social constraints of the UK, I began to build an identity as an artist alongside family life. The work was recognised as meaningful by the women around me — mothers who had also relocated to Western Australia for their husbands’ work. That shared condition of displacement and reinvention built the meaning.
Learning Community, network and female relationships are not peripheral to practice — they are structural to it. Making knowledge from inside a life requires others who acknowledge that life as meaningful.
FERAL STATE 