Study for Aerial III

This is an aerial view of one of the two sets of ranges where I live with my spouse and cat on a block a little south of Alice Springs. The airport is south of town too, so often flying home I see our house, as well as a different view of the landforms I know from ground level. I love the way the sparse vegetation of our desert means you can really see the bones of the landscape, the rock formations and the sense of how ancient these wrinkles and bumps of country are. It's almost maplike in its detail and precision.

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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.