Frontier Camel Yards

This is a bit of an elegaic painting as the Ross Highway Frontier Camel Camel Farm just east of Alice Springs no longer exists. It was my first local camel 'hang out', where I would go on a weekend afternoon to draw the camels, watch them, the cameleers and the visiting tourists and generally enjoy the ambience of working camel farm. In this image I wanted to get a sense of the different personalities of these working camels, both the proud fellow in the middle, waiting for his next passenger to the purple-haltered chap in the front more interested in a feed.

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I was born in 1967 in the west of England and came to Australia with my husband in 1998, settling in Alice Springs in 2000. After completing a BA and a PhD in Literature, and a period with the British Foreign Office, I began teaching in 1995, which I’ve been doing ever since.

I paint in oils and while I have no formal training, I have developed my practice over the years through my involvement with the Central Australian Art Society and Studio 12 artists’ collective (life-drawing, plein-air painting, exhibiting).

I’m fascinated by the identity of things, what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called their ‘inscape,’ the internal power that holds the elements together and makes the thing unique. My paintings are an attempt to represent the moment of glimpsing or ‘catching’ the inscape of the thing, be it a skyline, a person or a camel. They also explore the way light works both to shape and to convey identity and feeling. The quality of the light in central Australia still astonishes me after years here.