Born Australia
Lives & works Basel, Switzerland
A painter by training (CoFA UNSW, Sydney) and habit, I cross over into printmaking, sculpture, digital, and design according to the needs of the work. See below for some examples of my work across art & design.
After nearly 20 years working in the gallery and museums sector as a director and curator, I recently decided to return to my own artmaking practice. While my great strength in the gallery sector is my ability to understand the art from a practioner’s point of view and to communicate that to clients and gallery visitors, I had a creeping realisation that I was good-naturedly envying their extraordinary artistic labours and wishing that I, too, was in the studio. With the closure of Galerie Zadra, I decided there is no better time to return to my studio.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve experienced the world visually. My mind’s eye is constantly full of images which arise from my daily encounters with the concrete and the conceptual. Some vaporise almost immediately, others hang around for a bit, while others have been nagging me for decades to be outed.
To the outsider, my artistic ideas can appear like random themes but driving it all is a fascination with the human experience and knowledge across time and space.
I’m fascinated by the connections between people, things and time, even if these connections are not initially obvious. Eventually the connections materialise and my wonder at this thing called life intensifies.
Art is my way of finding and making visual sense of this complexity. It charts my crisscrossing journey across the churning sea that is my mind.
If there is one defining element that ties my multifarious practice together, it’s colour. I have always been drawn to colour, its power, subtleties and ambiguities, its truth, its lies.
I was once told by a lecturer that we all have our own unique colour biases that influence us. I told her I didn’t have any fixed colour preferences and she insisted that that was not possible. But I honestly don’t. Every colour to me can be equally beautiful and ugly, depending on how and where it occurs. Going into an art supply store and seeing a wall of pigments is torture for me, like a junkie in a drug den: I want them all. The considerable expense of artist quality pigments is the only thing that prevents me indulging my desire.
I see endless potential in every colour. I get excited by the tiniest nuances and interactions. To favour certain colours above others is simply impossible for me. Besides, why would I limit myself in that way? It’s the artistic equivalent of a labotomy.
So here I stand at the resumption of my life as an artist. As I add more work to this site, some will be presented in series, others will stand alone. At any point in the future I may continue to add new works to existing series if I have more to say.
Above all, I will be working to my own rhythm, not to an exhibition schedule (freedom, hooray!), unless a gallery wants to pay me obsence amounts of money to control my time.
What sense you draw from my peripatetic and disparate works is yours and yours alone.
Perhaps you see no sense at all, and I’m completely fine with that.
SPARKLING WINE LABEL & MUSELET
The design brief was to create front and rear labels for the winery’s prestige sparkling Riesling, “Domininkanerberg”, named after their flagship monopole vineyard. The label was to reflect the elegant and very fine nature of the 2014 wine, as well as the family’s 350+ years of traditional handcrafted winemaking.
The current owner and 11th generation winemaker, Carmen von Nell-Breuning, converted the vineyards to biodynamics in 2019. The plants that grow naturally in the vineyard and support the health of her vines, as well as her sheep, are important to her bio winemaking practice, so I made this special ecosystem the main feature of the design. Her faithful dog, Kaya, could not be left out! The blue-grey ink references the blue slate soil.
The design for the muselet was based on a combination of the winery’s crowned “N” logo and a deconstructed version of the family’s coat of arms arranged around the border. The design was then embossed into the metal cap. The red wire of the cage visually links the muselet to the vintage stamp at the top of the label.
I’m proud that this bottle has found its way into German Michelin star restaurants, the prestigious KaDeWe Berlin and fine wine bars.
N-Logo redesign
The crowned N-logo which graces every bottle produced by Weingut C. von Nell-Breuning was originally designed by Carmen’s father. After the muselet project was completed, Carmen felt it was time to refresh the logo.
The brief was to make the logo feel more contemporary without losing the sense of tradition, and to convey the winery’s artisanal approach.
Taking the “N” styling that was used in the muselet, I then sketched the crown and shaded the N by hand to reintroduced the human touch and to move the design away from a highly stylised graphic finish.
This logo is now used on the winery’s website and marketing materials. I created a simplified version for applications that cannot support fine line work.