This exhibition is an outcome of research produced as artist-in-residence at Carss Park Cottage, awarded by Georges River Council in 2021.

Using the site of Carss Park to reflect on my childhood home across the bay, I used the residency as an opportunity to look into the wake of my past, inspiring me to produce poetic evocations that explore residual experiences through my subconscious, and the mutability of my of my thinking and work process.

Creating from the cottage was an emotional and mentally challenging experience. Every day was a different colour, tone and feeling. Every work a verse. I found myself deeply reflecting, often melancholy, pondering the location from afar, like looking back at a distant island over the wake of a boat. Only this wake trails back to my childhood.

It’s been over twenty years since moving from Sans Souci on the peninsula to Hurstville, then to Jannali, to Sutherland and now at Gymea Bay. Sans Souci (ironically, French words meaning “without worry” or “free and easy”), brings about mixed and complex feelings. Doing the residency helped me reason with things I left behind to re-discover these associations. Each day looking out the window of the cottage, walking the grounds of Carss Park felt as if I was wading in the tide of the past and the present - a live trigger for post traumatic experience and psychological displacement.

Furthermore, the residency not only allowed me to delve into my subconscious and explore the human condition, but it helped me rediscover new notes in my subterranean voice that would otherwise lay dormant somewhere in my inner child. To record my history as a local artist, documenting my movement through time, my autobiography, and weave relevant art historical references, both surreal and existential.

The works before you, are born from the wake. The “wake”, also a play on words in the surrealist tradition, reveals my fascination with the intuitive sifting of my psyche, and the unfurling of my emotional responses to the world around me. I wake from that mysterious place. Every image a psychic montage. Every image a trove of ambiguity and enigma.

My aim: to make visible the intimate and elusive qualities of things from my world in waking.