Art as wayfinding
My Tahitian ancestors navigated the vast Pacific Ocean without maps, instead they read the shifting signifiers in the sea, wind and sky to reach their destinations.
It is a radically different thing to navigate without knowing the path itself because the path is shifting and only reveals itself in the moment we take a step, or plunge an oar.
Similarly, my art practice is an intensely personal process of wayfinding, with a vague notion of the destination, and far more questions than answers. The artworks produced along the way are not the goal of this journey, they are by-products of my attempts at understanding and transformation. They are what is left in my wake.
Bio
I grew up immersed in photography. My father was a prolific amateur photographer, shooting slide film since the 50s, light meter and all. Thanks to him we have amazing family archives from our life in Tahiti, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and suburban Brisbane. My brother, sister and I were forever being arranged and photographed alongside our Mama, all the while quietly cursing our methodical and meticulous director. Then, when I was 16, I was plucked from obscurity and spent most of the next decade or so in front of the camera, working around the world with top photographers in fashion and advertising. This imprinted on me the most intimate relationship with the photographic image and a deep empathy for the photographic subject; from both an aesthetic point of view as well as the mechanics and politics of representation. It was not a career I was suited to, though. As a child, I was cripplingly shy, often hiding under my Mama’s skirt. I lived in my own world, a place where everything, animate and inanimate alike, was alive and had feelings. I was a bit like a raw nerve exposed to the emotional elements of the world. The truth is I haven’t changed much at all. I rarely walk a hundred metres without stopping, overwhelmed by the image of some tiny thing, maybe a discarded pedalstool fan, blades spinning impotently in the moonlight. The compulsion to record it is visceral. And so, really, image-making is my sanctuary.
I bought my first 35mm camera when I was 24 years old, and it’s been a refuge ever since. In my late 20s, I began assisting photographers, studying photography more formally, and working in a photographic gallery in Sydney. I’ve lived in a lot of different places, from Tahiti, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam to Amsterdam, New York and Sydney. I managed to raise a pair of formidable twin daughters and complete a degree in photography from RMIT along the way. Strange as it might sound, I’ve pretty much avoided exhibiting work or even thinking of myself as an artist for most of the last thirty years. At the same time, though, I’ve been making images almost constantly.
