DV
portfolio
THE ROOM HOLDS - opening on the 4th July 2026, 4pm
Traffic Jam Galleries, Darlinghurst
A series of still life and interior paintings exploring how domestic spaces are shaped by memory, imagination, presence, and absence. Vacated chairs, lingering traces, childhood memories, imagined worlds, and quiet moments of tension transform familiar interiors into spaces that hold more than what is immediately visible. These works consider the home not as a static backdrop, but as an active place where experiences, thoughts, and memories continue to resonate.
ON THE BRINK 2026
SOLO EXHIBITION APRIL - MAY 2026
Milk Factory Gallery, Bowral, Southern Highlands
‘On the Brink’ gathers a body of paintings that refuse to settle. They hover at the lip of collapse, charged with the uneasy thrill of almost. Interiors skew off-axis, gardens tilt, abstract forms tremble, mythic shards and fractured still lifes vibrate under pressure. Balance isn’t achieved , it is tested. Every composition holds its breath.
Objects lean as if ready to fall, figures bend toward an unseen weight, storms pulse in contained spaces, and patterns emerge like fragile codes of survival. Humour flickers alongside vulnerability, suggesting that equilibrium is never owned, only momentarily borrowed. In these trembling thresholds, fragility becomes the very measure of being alive - a lived sensation of hanging between worlds, just on the edge.
Current practice
My recent work explores domestic interiors through still life, where familiar objects become traces of memory, absence, and imagination. Through subtle shifts in arrangement, ordinary spaces take on a quiet psychological presence. Rather than depicting rooms as fixed places, the paintings consider how interiors are continually shaped by presence, perception, and the stories we bring to them.
2026
Stories we tell III
My practice centers around a collage-based approach. Each piece is built like a puzzle—layering fragments, spontaneous gestures, and recurring motifs to create compositions that invite slow, intuitive exploration. Influenced by Rococo painting, botanical illustration, and modernist abstraction, I’m drawn to the tension between clarity and collapse, decoration and decay. I’m interested in what happens when visual histories, personal memories, and imagined elements coexist on a single surface.
2025
Constructed realities
My art is a dialogue between the observer and the observed. It is an invitation to explore the depths of one’s imagination, to question the boundaries of reality, and to find solace in the act of creation. Through my work, I hope to evoke emotions, spark curiosity, and inspire a renewed appreciation for the world that surrounds us.
2022- 2024
2019-2020
sTORIES WE TELL
As we live, we record. We try to remember, and we leave traces. We construct the narrative of our lives from a collection of memories of key events. Sometimes, these memories are fortified by photographs, souvenirs, or places, but the passage of time is constantly reshaping and eroding our perceptions of these artifacts. We are left to ponder what has been preserved.
I am particularly interested in these vagaries of memory and historical narrative and where they spill over into the realm of fiction. The stories we tell, whether they are grounded in reality or imagination, help us form a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. They shape us, just as we shape them.
2012
2012 horizon line
Having grown up in Europe, I have always experienced definite boundaries in landscape: In contrast, travelling through the Australian landscape there is a sense of infinity, and frequently only suggestions of human activity. I find this fascinating.
In my current paintings, I combine the absence of human figures with the presence of tended agriculture, water tanks and communication lines which serve to imply the human activity. As I seek to portray landscapes that are visually and emotionally powerful, I find a strong affinity with the Romantic painters of the sublime landscape, such as Turner or Friedrich. Although the aesthetics of my work are heavily influenced by abstract expressionism, it is the concept of the sublime that most eloquently describes the intentions I have for my paintings. A sublime landscape possesses a sense of grandeur, intensity, and importance: it has the ability to make humans feel small, to see their lives with perspective and their troubles as less important.
2010
MENHIRS - The cultural landscapes of a mining town
My work explores the similarity between the ancient megaliths and the abandoned industrial buildings our culture leaves behind. I believe that ordinary or everyday landscapes are important historical artefacts which can be read like documents so that cultural meaning and environmental experience can be deciphered and better understood.
My mining background and heritage determine my interest in the centuries old struggle between the forces of industry and nature. I was born in a small mining town which now is filled with structural foundations of mine ‘heads’ which had been reduced to anonymous minimal concrete monuments. There is something mystical about the modern ‘menhirs’, they are at once placid and confronting. They carry the power and mystical sense of the past but also address the concerns of current culture.
2009
2008 Round the hoist
I’m intrigued by the idea of exploring the overlooked, gritty corners of Australian suburbia, transforming personal experiences into a cohesive and fresh perspective. My goal is to elevate ordinary urban scenes and everyday objects, imbuing them with a heightened significance that encourages viewers to see each element as a piece of art in its own right. This project aims to forge a unified narrative and a distinct identity from these familiar yet often neglected aspects of suburban life.
2008
2008 Patterns of habitiation
My work aims to explore how people use space in a modern urban context and the assumption of the permanence of our way of life and our cities. I am intrigued by the patterns we make on the surface of the earth and how we ‘own’ it, although our own existence is transitory.
Patterns of habitation’ is an amalgam of many elements, memories, signs, language, fears and desires, all floating somewhere in space and time, dream and reality. What is to be and what is yet to come. Assuming forms to only then disappear…..
2007
Miller's point
The work, like human habitats is built of many layers, cranes pulling up other cranes, scaffoldings that embrace other scaffoldings, beams that prop up other beams, only then to be scrapped back, erased and destroyed. The process of building and dismantling is repeated until finally a sense of organic geometry is revealed.
