Ilparpa Study III

I live with my spouse between two sets of ranges south of Alice Springs. I like to run along the road near our house by the side of the ranges most mornings. The light is amazing at this time of day and I'll often stop and catch some shots of the colours and shapes, and catch my breath . . . I love to doodle the shapes of the range-line and the rocks strewn on the hillside in paint and pencil. It amazes me how ancient these landforms are.

Follow

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.