Study for Aerial V: The river

This little study is one of a series of 'in flight' images, from trips north and south from my home of central Australia. I'm captivated by the ancient power of the country seen from above. I wanted to explore the contrasts in colour and texture here of a landscape seen from a different perspective, from the carved out lines of the dry river to the changes in reds, pinks and greens of the land to the strange blue-ing of the distant land, sealed off by the border of cloud. I wonder how many years this river has been carving through the country.

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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.