In The Five Obstructions exhibition at Dubbo’s Western Plains Cultural Centre, I created five works based on sets of rules or ‘obstructions’ set by five contemporary artists. The exhibition borrowed its name and concept from a Lars von Trier film, in which a filmmaker is challenged to remake his classic short film under five sets of obstructions provided by a colleague. My goal was to disrupt my fairly traditional painting practice through the influence of contemporary artists' ideas.

Cudgegong Valley – ochre tempera on ironbark

“Everything you use to create your artwork – canvas, brushes, paints etc. – has to be made by you using natural materials.” Gamilaroi multimedia artist and curator Paris Norton

This piece is a combination of historical art practices from both Indigenous Australian artists and medieval European painters. With support from the Local Aboriginal Land Council, I gathered ochre near Mudgee, and combined the ground pigment with egg yolk from backyard chickens to make an egg tempera paint.

Blind Bouquet – acrylic and modelling paste on plywood

“Create a painting without viewing the canvas until the work is finished.” Performance artist Tom Isaacs

I used modelling paste to thicken the paint so that I could feel where I had painted and let my hands be my vision. This piece was the most daunting challenge for me – it was not the most technically difficult piece, but it took away my most common tool for judgement and decision-making, loosening my control over the result.

Dinner with Mona Lisa – photo print on cotton rag paper

“Create an artwork using items and objects from your kitchen as your materials.” Mudgee installation artist Aleshia Lonsdale

I puzzled over how to make a piece with food that would also be hygienic in the gallery. Using a photo gave me full freedom to use everything in my kitchen, inspired in part by a friend’s photos of foods in various states of decay. The face is pizza dough, and I ate a lot of these ingredients on a pizza the night I finished it.

Dream Diary – mixed media on book pages

“I will call you randomly over the next week.  Make an artwork about what you are going through at the moment I call you and you must make it out of the physical context in which you happen to be in.” Photomedia artist and Cementa cofounder Alex Wisser

Alex’s phone call woke me in the morning, so I used dreams as the subject for this piece, and painted it on book pages because my bed is always surrounded by books I am reading, have read, or plan to read. I know Alex is a great believer in artmaking as a communal process, so I asked friends to describe their dreams to me.

Autumn Mirror – oil on MDF panel

“A self portrait using the colour palette of your favourite season, painted with the opposite hand and without a mirror or reference image.” Photographer and designer Gus Armstrong

Painting or drawing with the non-dominant hand gives a wobbly and imprecise character to an artist’s lines and I chose to embrace that quality for this piece. Not using a reference image and working with my left hand meant I couldn’t be drawn in by my usual desire for precision and correctness.

The Biding Time country halls tour visited five villages in central west NSW with a production that I wrote and directed with a Mudgee cast and crew. Three actors and our composer/musician played a range of crazy characters to tell the story of a country girl’s rise to fame and her search for happiness.

Coming out of the BiDiNG TiME concept, which encourages different communities to produce localised versions of its ‘rise to fame’ story, this play's first form was a staged reading at Dubbo's Artlands regional arts conference. Based on the success of that staging, we received Create NSW funding from Arts on Tour to go on the road.

The production was greeted warmly and enthusiastically by our village audiences, who were eager to have us return with another show.

For the 2019 Viva la Novella covers, we wanted to create a textured feel, so I used different media on varied surfaces to create covers that felt tactile and inventive. Each cover has a different personality, but they are tied together by the use of charcoal and watercolour sketches, linoprinting, and paper collage.

A Little Piece of Heaven is the story of Narromine Wiradjuri elders Ruth and Dick Carney. I worked with Dick and Ruth to turn their life experience into a book, recording hours of conversation as they told me about growing up around Narromine and Warren, working the shearing sheds of western NSW, and the joys and struggles of Aboriginal life in twentieth-century Australia. I spun their words into a book and painted cover art of the Macquarie River, which has been a major presence throughout their lives. Ruth and Dick are wonderful people and cherished friends, and it’s an honour to be part of telling their story.

The book is available via the Mudgee Readers’ Festival.

Paper Pear is an eclectic gallery in Wagga Wagga NSW.  When gallery owner Stephanie Day took her wares to Orange in 2019 for her second popup exhibition at the Corner Store Gallery, I was very happy to be involved as an artist in the neighbourhood of Orange. I took along three miniatures depicting the Orange region and a fourth from a trip to Queensland the year before - all 20cm x 20cm oil on board. All sold during the exhibition, and I’m looking to working with Paper Pear again in the future.

More a writing project for me than an art project, Insex is a funny, sweet and sexy play I wrote about the mating lives of insects, grubs, and all small things, with characters including a caterpillar, a snail and a venus fly trap. Insex was staged at the Blood Moon Theatre, Potts Point, in November 2018.

I continued to illustrate the covers for the Viva la Novella prizewinners in 2018, in this particular year producing one cover that was right in my wheelhouse and one that challenged me with a different approach. Both winners this year were writers from New Zealand, and for Swim by Avi Duckor-Jones we went with a gentle naïve image of the central swimmer, while Ana Jackson’s The Bed-Making Competition received a detailed patterned drawing of the staircase where the book’s characters gather.

The Drover's Wives is Ryan O’Neill’s retelling of a Henry Lawson shirt story in 99 different forms, from a mystery novel to a sporting commentary to a sitcom script. As an artist living in Lawson country and a great admirer of Ryan’s previous work, I loved being part of the project as the illustrator of the book’s comic strip and political cartoon retellings.

I was a finalist in the 2018 Little Things Art Prize with a portrait of my dog, Rosie, in the spot where she sleeps while I work on paintings like this. The prize is curated each year by Marnie Ross, and it asks artists to enter “creative expressions of the ‘Little Things’ that make them happy or feel grateful”. The finalist exhibition at Saint Cloche in Paddington is always a delightful and eclectic collection of small works. It’s an exhibition I really love, so I was thrilled to be part of it.

Exhibition photo courtesy of the Little Things Art Prize.

Sports Luxe Vintage is a small, independent t-shirt label, based in Mudgee. When Sam from SLV decided it was time to close down the label and go in a new direction, she approached me to create a unique farewell image.

The Farm Series illustrations are a collaboration with two of my Mudgee favourites - designer Amber Hooper and Robert Stein Winery. A set of four hipster farm animals, all of which can be found living on the Robert Stein property. At this stage only two of the wines are on the market, and I can tell you what’s inside the bottle is as good as what’s on the outside.

Photo by Amber Hooper.

A series of promotions designed by Amber Hooper and illustrated by me, for music events organised by the Union Bank Wine Bar in Orange.

For 2017’s Seizure Viva la Novella competition, we decided to use hand-painted linocuts to illustrate the covers of the winning novella covers. Mirandi Riwoe’s The Fish Girl and Stephen Wright’s A Second Life were a particularly outstanding pair of books, and The Fish Girl was shortlisted for the Stella Prize.

In 2015, I returned to painting in oils after many years of exhibiting exclusively in pen and wash. The large, loose oils were a contrast to my careful drawings, and provided a challenge and a change of pace. My tool of choice was a palette knife, which forced me to keep my technique loose and expressive.

The pieces pictured here were hung at Fairview ArtSpace in Mudgee in 2017. One depicts a home in San Gimignano, and the other is a bouquet of native flowers painted as a demonstration. Both works sold at Fairview.

An iPhone app putting more than 100 Aussie icons in your pocket, and all developed in Mudgee NSW! G’dayMoji was conceived by local designer Amber Hooper, as a way of translating Aussie ideas into emoticon form. The stickers in the app allow users to drop Australian icons, sports, foods, places, animals and lingo into a conversation as easily as hitting copy and paste.

The app launched with a bang in 2018, hitting the top of the iTunes paid app charts for Hottest 100 weekend, and putting its creators in the news, including this report by the ABC.

Find the app online at gdaymoji.com.au

Sunday Afternoon in Mudgee, from my 2017 calendar collection, was a finalist in the 2017 Muswellbrook Art Prize. A great honour for a little painting - only 28cm by 17cm.

A calendar of beloved scenes from around the Mudgee region.

A classic oil portrait painted at the end of 2016, depicting the 18th century Admiral of the Fleet George Anson - for the Lord Anson Public House in Orange NSW.

In 2016 for the first time I illustrated the covers of Seizure’s Viva la Novella books. The annual competition publishes a pair of excellent short novels each year - in 2016 it was Rose Mulready’s The Bonobo’s Dream and George Haddad’s Populate and Perish.

In 2015, for the first time I exhibited a collection of my recent oil and palette knife landscapes. A Different Perspective at Artisan on Lewis in Mudgee featured pieces inspired by landscapes of the Mudgee region. I was still getting used to the drying time of oils again; most of the exhibition was hung wet.

The 2016 calendar collection included images from around the Mudgee region, including Hill End, Gulgong and Rylstone.

A mural in the front window of the Australia Council for the Arts on Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills. Four illustrator artists illustrated pieces of flash fiction from Seizure Online’s Flashers series. The work, completed in 2015, unexpectedly became a permanent installation. My work illustrated a story by Tincture Journal editor Daniel Young.

A big colourful image to promote the Mudgee Makers’ Market, which brings together Mudgee’s greatest strengths - food and creativity!

Illustrations for Seizure Online’s Flashers flash fiction series, published weekly during 2015. This was a wonderful project which involved working with a variety of intriguing stories from talented writers, and finding the style and technique to match each story.

Read the stories and see the illustrations in their original contexts here.

Since 2015, I have been creating hand-drawn maps for various purposes around the central west. The first was for Peppertree Hill, farm accommodation just outside Mudgee - the map can be found offering directions around the property on the Peppertree Hill website. Other maps have depicted the town of Geurie, the Mudgee Readers’ Festival venues, and the Orana Arts region.

Digitally-coloured pen illustrations of Black Star Pastry’s cake range. These drawings were used on menus and promotions in-store and at events such as Good Food Month’s Night Noodle Markets.

Over the years I have created a number of posters for productions at Mudgee’s Town Hall Theatre.

My 2015 Mudgee calendar collection included the Mechanics’ Institute, Mudgee Public School, Mudgee Farmers’ Market, Cobb and Co Court, Elton’s Café, Gulgong’s Greatest Wonder of the World Building, Rylstone’s Bridge View Inn, and scenes of Market Street in Mudgee at sunset and sunrise.

My 2012 calendar collection combined some of Mudgee’s most iconic locations with some of my own personal favourite places such as Fairview ArtSpace, the Town Hall Theatre, Roth’s Wine Bar and The Drip.

The #centralwest exhibition was a collaboration with artist Matilda Julian, held in February 2014 at the Fire Station Arts Centre in Dubbo. We exhibited seven pairs of works painted in seven towns: Geurie, Mudgee, Rylstone, Dubbo, Wellington, Gulgong and Goolma. The paintings were the result of a series of plein air excursions, during which we both completed a work in each town. Opposite these fourteen pieces, we filled a wall with sketches of scenery and life from around the central west region.