Towards the Bungle Bungles

On a trip to NW Australia (NT and WA), we were lucky enough to make an early morning light airplane scenic flight from Kununurra to the Bungle Bungle Ranges in Purnululu National Park. The ranges were fabulous of course, but the whole flight there and back, across all sorts of country from the massive Lake Argyle to the rolling wooded ranges I've painted here, was a joyful and inspiring experience. The play of light and shadow of the landforms and vegetation, the greens and pinks and purple-blues were a delight to re-create in this work. I wanted to make it a diptych (two separate works) to emphasise the jigsaw-like patchwork of the land, that can be viewed in tiny chunks and larger swathes.

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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.