“I was born in Cowra in Central Western NSW and grew up in Goolagong just outside Cowra. Both my parents have a connection with that area. My Dad grew up there and Mum grew up in Sydney but her mum, my grandmother grew up in Cowra. My mum and dad met at a country dance and my sister and brother and I were born in there.
My parents then moved to Matong in the Riverina region of NSW, with my Sister Virginia and my brother Ben when I was 10; where they ran a pub. Prior to that my mum worked for the Guardian newspaper in Cowra and my dad was a Stock & Station agent. They bought The Farmers Home Hotel and we lived on top of the pub until I was 16. The town consisted of about 200 people so you knew everyone and the pub was the real centre of the town. Living in pubs for me and my sister has defined our love of community, and how we engage in with people, the place we live and making things happen. I often feel that I’m not necessarily aspirational for myself but aspirational for the community I live within. Partly I put this down to living in pubs that provide a service as a central hub of a rural town.
My parents sent us to Sydney to go to school. They thought we would move there eventually so I ended up going to Catholic Girls boarding school in Kings Cross which was interesting. It was sometimes fun and sometimes weird, to find yourself right in the middle of notorious 80’s Kings Cross with a bunch of teenage girls all away from home in the big city. I remember the first night when we would come back from holidays, you would hear everyone sobbing through the dorm. I was 12 when I went away to high school but was 16 when we all moved to Sydney.
My parents managed a pub out near Matraville for a while and then after that they managed a pub in Berala near Lidcombe in Western Sydney. We lived on top of that pub. It was such a multicultural place, really different from the small rural towns I had lived in before, and I got to learn about all kinds of people and how they live together in community. My life has been interesting living in a small country town, living in a multicultural urban place with communities of people from Vietnam, Russia, Middle East and Eastern Europe.
I left home and went to study drama after year 12 in Penrith at the University of Western Sydney. It was my first time out of home right in Sydney’s west. There was this bunch of wild art and drama students all meshing together, I learnt a lot of new things there! Theatre school didn’t really work for me, I knew there was something not quite right for me, I loved watching theatre but I was more interested in performance and performance art.
I took 2 years off study, worked, performed made art and travelled around Australia and ended up living in Tasmania for a couple of years with a bunch of punks, ferals and hippies, Involved in forest blockading, music, performance and community arts. It was amazing and pretty formative time, teaching me about things I wanted and things I didn’t want. Whilst in Tassie I worked for a puppet Theatre company called Terrapin and I also became involved with 2 other performers, Lily Blue and Deborah Redley and we created a performance group called Rawcus. I started getting involved in Visual Arts as well and I wanted to meld the two somehow. My friend Lily Blue introduced me to Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit book about performance art and I learnt about other wild women performance artists such as Karen Findlay. I see this as important formative time that I began developing ideas for creating characters like Peggy Popart and the work I do with Roundabout Theatre with Valley Lipcer and Gabrielle Griffin and 100 Wonder Place.
From Tassie I came back and forth to Sydney I fell in love with a chap and I moved back to live in Newtown where I had lived previously with a bunch of amazing women I went to school with who to this day are still good friends. I had lived in this legendary house in Station St that my dear friend Zoe’s family owned, we had great parties, made art, did performance and sailed the ups and downs with each other like good friends in share houses do!
When I came back to Sydney I must have come up to Lismore at some stage and realised there was a uni here. I was living in this very urban part of Sydney in Enmore and in 1994 I came here to live and study Visual Arts. I loved it! The environment and art school with all the different mediums to explore painting, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture and I chose printmaking. I also loved sculpture but throughout my degree I became really interested in paper making. I melded all of those when I did my final year and honours exhibition. I spent 2 years here and I decided to have a break. I went back to Sydney and there was a teacher that I was interested in at Sydney College of the Arts so I studied there. Actually I had a broken heart and a close friend of mine had committed suicided. I was heartbroken and shaken up and I needed some space, but I knew I would come back to Lismore eventually as my dear friend Elvis lived in the region and my sister Virginia lived here with her daughter Jericho who is now 23.
I started to do a lot more drawing when I went to SCA, I realised I loved the process of printmaking but it was necessary to have all of the equipment whereas drawing is immediate. I came back to finish the last year of my degree in Lismore as there was a paper making teacher called Tim Mosely at SCU and he was doing some amazing things. I completed my last year and went on to do my Honours year. In my Honours year I made work which was all about Erotic writing and the power of the word and how it the can physically affect the body. It was very academic but the outcome was very beautiful. It made me realise there was something missing. I was doing lots of drawing. My own personal stuff outside the academic field was these little drawings I would make. I’ve always been interested in repetition and little things and I hadn’t introduced them into my work at uni because I thought they wouldn’t be seen as particularly academic. I really needed to look at that for myself and be brave enough to create the artwork I wanted to make.
In the last 5 years I’ve been making small drawings with a technique which probably started when I was living in Japan. I went to Japan in 2003 to study paper making. I stayed for a year and a half. I love learning new things and I love to search out interesting teachers. I had friends living there and I took some of my work over there to exhibit. I had made paper dresses out of paper I made for my Grad show. I taught English and did performance with friends. That was a fun time. I found a paper making teacher on a little island in Okinawa and I stayed there for 4 months teaching English to the children of the people who ran the hostel on Iriomote Island . We would harvest the plant, boil the plant, create the fibre for the paper and then make the paper. It was hard work but I loved it, the opportunity to humble myself to the task.
I came back to Australia when my sister was having her son Sky. I continued to make work. One of the things I did whilst in Japan was make a series of tiny drawings like little square stickers. When I was travelling I would sketch what I saw out the window on them. I think that’s the origin of the tags I’m doing now. There’s a joy in repetition for me.
The exhibition I have just held at the Muse Contemporary Gallery is called ‘All the places I never went and some…’ The ‘and some…’ is some that I did go to, memories of places I’d been, places I’d imagined and places we can never go to as they are paintings or drawings created from imagination not real places. It took a year to make. I find it really interesting how people look at a sunset and say ‘Oh it’s so picturesque!’ It’s like they are referencing a picture while looking at real nature rather than a picture. It’s a weird double bind.
It was a real pleasure for me creating the artworks for my exhibition I loved experimenting with different materials and techniques and there is a simple beauty in them that feels delightful.
I am pretty busy with other work as the Learning Officer at the Gallery. I’ve been with the Gallery for 6 years but last year I got a permanent position so that was exciting. It’s a great team and a lovely bunch of people. Brett is such a great boss, he really trusts in us and our team create wonderful things together at the gallery. I’m very proud of how we all worked really hard along with the community to get the new gallery off the ground. I Also work as Peggy Popart Tour guide character at the gallery, she is a very fun and interesting character to play. I have also been working with Roundabout Theatre and 100 Wonder Place as one of their performers and co-creatives and facilitating art for people with disability for REDinc.”
My parents then moved to Matong in the Riverina region of NSW, with my Sister Virginia and my brother Ben when I was 10; where they ran a pub. Prior to that my mum worked for the Guardian newspaper in Cowra and my dad was a Stock & Station agent. They bought The Farmers Home Hotel and we lived on top of the pub until I was 16. The town consisted of about 200 people so you knew everyone and the pub was the real centre of the town. Living in pubs for me and my sister has defined our love of community, and how we engage in with people, the place we live and making things happen. I often feel that I’m not necessarily aspirational for myself but aspirational for the community I live within. Partly I put this down to living in pubs that provide a service as a central hub of a rural town.
My parents sent us to Sydney to go to school. They thought we would move there eventually so I ended up going to Catholic Girls boarding school in Kings Cross which was interesting. It was sometimes fun and sometimes weird, to find yourself right in the middle of notorious 80’s Kings Cross with a bunch of teenage girls all away from home in the big city. I remember the first night when we would come back from holidays, you would hear everyone sobbing through the dorm. I was 12 when I went away to high school but was 16 when we all moved to Sydney.
My parents managed a pub out near Matraville for a while and then after that they managed a pub in Berala near Lidcombe in Western Sydney. We lived on top of that pub. It was such a multicultural place, really different from the small rural towns I had lived in before, and I got to learn about all kinds of people and how they live together in community. My life has been interesting living in a small country town, living in a multicultural urban place with communities of people from Vietnam, Russia, Middle East and Eastern Europe.
I left home and went to study drama after year 12 in Penrith at the University of Western Sydney. It was my first time out of home right in Sydney’s west. There was this bunch of wild art and drama students all meshing together, I learnt a lot of new things there! Theatre school didn’t really work for me, I knew there was something not quite right for me, I loved watching theatre but I was more interested in performance and performance art.
I took 2 years off study, worked, performed made art and travelled around Australia and ended up living in Tasmania for a couple of years with a bunch of punks, ferals and hippies, Involved in forest blockading, music, performance and community arts. It was amazing and pretty formative time, teaching me about things I wanted and things I didn’t want. Whilst in Tassie I worked for a puppet Theatre company called Terrapin and I also became involved with 2 other performers, Lily Blue and Deborah Redley and we created a performance group called Rawcus. I started getting involved in Visual Arts as well and I wanted to meld the two somehow. My friend Lily Blue introduced me to Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit book about performance art and I learnt about other wild women performance artists such as Karen Findlay. I see this as important formative time that I began developing ideas for creating characters like Peggy Popart and the work I do with Roundabout Theatre with Valley Lipcer and Gabrielle Griffin and 100 Wonder Place.
From Tassie I came back and forth to Sydney I fell in love with a chap and I moved back to live in Newtown where I had lived previously with a bunch of amazing women I went to school with who to this day are still good friends. I had lived in this legendary house in Station St that my dear friend Zoe’s family owned, we had great parties, made art, did performance and sailed the ups and downs with each other like good friends in share houses do!
When I came back to Sydney I must have come up to Lismore at some stage and realised there was a uni here. I was living in this very urban part of Sydney in Enmore and in 1994 I came here to live and study Visual Arts. I loved it! The environment and art school with all the different mediums to explore painting, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture and I chose printmaking. I also loved sculpture but throughout my degree I became really interested in paper making. I melded all of those when I did my final year and honours exhibition. I spent 2 years here and I decided to have a break. I went back to Sydney and there was a teacher that I was interested in at Sydney College of the Arts so I studied there. Actually I had a broken heart and a close friend of mine had committed suicided. I was heartbroken and shaken up and I needed some space, but I knew I would come back to Lismore eventually as my dear friend Elvis lived in the region and my sister Virginia lived here with her daughter Jericho who is now 23.
I started to do a lot more drawing when I went to SCA, I realised I loved the process of printmaking but it was necessary to have all of the equipment whereas drawing is immediate. I came back to finish the last year of my degree in Lismore as there was a paper making teacher called Tim Mosely at SCU and he was doing some amazing things. I completed my last year and went on to do my Honours year. In my Honours year I made work which was all about Erotic writing and the power of the word and how it the can physically affect the body. It was very academic but the outcome was very beautiful. It made me realise there was something missing. I was doing lots of drawing. My own personal stuff outside the academic field was these little drawings I would make. I’ve always been interested in repetition and little things and I hadn’t introduced them into my work at uni because I thought they wouldn’t be seen as particularly academic. I really needed to look at that for myself and be brave enough to create the artwork I wanted to make.
In the last 5 years I’ve been making small drawings with a technique which probably started when I was living in Japan. I went to Japan in 2003 to study paper making. I stayed for a year and a half. I love learning new things and I love to search out interesting teachers. I had friends living there and I took some of my work over there to exhibit. I had made paper dresses out of paper I made for my Grad show. I taught English and did performance with friends. That was a fun time. I found a paper making teacher on a little island in Okinawa and I stayed there for 4 months teaching English to the children of the people who ran the hostel on Iriomote Island . We would harvest the plant, boil the plant, create the fibre for the paper and then make the paper. It was hard work but I loved it, the opportunity to humble myself to the task.
I came back to Australia when my sister was having her son Sky. I continued to make work. One of the things I did whilst in Japan was make a series of tiny drawings like little square stickers. When I was travelling I would sketch what I saw out the window on them. I think that’s the origin of the tags I’m doing now. There’s a joy in repetition for me.
The exhibition I have just held at the Muse Contemporary Gallery is called ‘All the places I never went and some…’ The ‘and some…’ is some that I did go to, memories of places I’d been, places I’d imagined and places we can never go to as they are paintings or drawings created from imagination not real places. It took a year to make. I find it really interesting how people look at a sunset and say ‘Oh it’s so picturesque!’ It’s like they are referencing a picture while looking at real nature rather than a picture. It’s a weird double bind.
It was a real pleasure for me creating the artworks for my exhibition I loved experimenting with different materials and techniques and there is a simple beauty in them that feels delightful.
I am pretty busy with other work as the Learning Officer at the Gallery. I’ve been with the Gallery for 6 years but last year I got a permanent position so that was exciting. It’s a great team and a lovely bunch of people. Brett is such a great boss, he really trusts in us and our team create wonderful things together at the gallery. I’m very proud of how we all worked really hard along with the community to get the new gallery off the ground. I Also work as Peggy Popart Tour guide character at the gallery, she is a very fun and interesting character to play. I have also been working with Roundabout Theatre and 100 Wonder Place as one of their performers and co-creatives and facilitating art for people with disability for REDinc.”