My emerging painting practice explores orientation, personal narrative, and opacity through the shifting lens of my queer identity. Working primarily in oil, I use painting to trace the contours of my lived experience as a queer person moving through Australian heteronormative culture.

 

A recurring presence in my work is a green and white striped motif that functions as a non human alter ego and as a visual interruption that unsettles the authority of representation. This stripe wanders through my compositions with a will of its own, at times concealing and at times announcing itself, and it carries the tension between visibility and invisibility. It reflects the internal push and pull I feel between masculinity and femininity. Stripes call attention while also diverting it. They can reveal as easily as they can obscure. For me, they capture the paradox of queerness, the wish to merge with the crowd and the insistence on standing apart.

 

My imagery draws on garments, vintage cars, foreign urban spaces, and personal iconography shaped by past careers in fashion design, hospitality, and aviation, as well as early play with both toy cars and dolls. These industries, with their focus on uniform, performance, and presentation, have become part of my visual vocabulary. I use a spectrum of techniques and degrees of opacity and transparency to distort and interrupt the representational logic of these subjects, shaping them into forms that speak more closely to the layered nature of queer experience.

 

By advancing, distracting, and at times misbehaving within the frame, the green and white stripes offer a bold and audacious presence. They project a confidence or spark of attitude that I do not always embody in daily life, yet painting allows me to inhabit it fully.