I am an Australian born interdisciplinary artist practicing in the fields of performance, video, painting, drawing, collage and installation. I have exhibited in Australia, France, Germany, Austria, USA and Holland since 1992. I embrace a DIY (or perhaps more appropriately : a make it up as you go along) approach in terms of material and concept, I’ve always believed that this offers a more vital outcome than a directorial approach, because this makes the process of artmaking harder rather than easier and opens spaces for mistakes and failure which I believe to be an antedote to the slick (and somewhat boring) generic art of late capitalism, an art that is perhaps also too big to fail, in the current vernacular. The use of a variable material palette also provides me with a movement away from stylistic capture, so I’m often surprised by what I produce, and I tend to get bored with processes where the outcomes are predictable. I’m seeking to create a vital artwork of becomings and sensations, a lot of my practice involves learning and then unlearning skills, which provides a freshness for me as producer and hopefully for the audience too. I’ve lived in Europe since 1997 and have exhibited and performed in various institutions and off-space galleries, although over the last five years I’ve concentrated on works for the internet and for family reasons have had something of a hiatus in relation to exhibition practice, although of course my studio practice has continued. In my studio work I often employ surrealist strategies and have a consistent interest in certain psychological and perception issues. After being somewhat sceptical about the relationship of art to politics, specifically co-opting issues and the observation that a lot of art-politics projects are like social science projects from primary school, I have come to believe that art can have an effect on political consciousness, this is the reason that I have been drawing what should rightly be a form of political cartooning and using the internet to disperse them and their ideas, rather than placing them in the sterile, closed circuit and ultimately comprimised fine art context. In this sense I believe that it is important to appropriately protest evil and suffering and not to aestheticise it.

Having been involved in the “world” side of the art world for so long (working in galleries, contributing to artist spaces, working for other artists, being in and around institutions etc) I’ve always been attracted to the detritus of the processes. An example of this are Buckyballs (2005-ongoing), but through my blog I’ll be discussing other examples from time to time…