About

At some stage I became a ‘bird lady’. I don’t remember when it happened, but here we are.

Wings show up in lots of my paintings. Sometimes they are from birds or butterflies, sometimes they are borrowed from fantasy as in fairy wings, and sometimes there are ‘real wings’ on ‘real people’. The notion of flight fascinates me, being that like all of us, I am as airborne as a Kiwi (see what I did there?)

I grew up on a huge farm, where living things were constant and even mundane. Some of that is in my work. Where the fantasy came from, I genuinely don't know.

Animals, birds and plants are in nearly all of my work. So are things with no business being there, which either soften a painting or argue with it. I like both.

Pink turns up constantly, which surprises me every time, because I am not a ‘pink girl’. But it goes on lush and it holds the light, anywhere from dayglo down to something almost dusty, and I have stopped fighting it.

Contradictions turn up in every part of my life, but they have always made sense to me. I was a farm girl running around in my gumboots and rainbow coloured skirt. I trained in Sport Science and then became an art-school dropout, who retrained as a teacher (Art and PE obviously).

Then I re-retrained as a trauma counsellor. Part of my week is spent sitting with people in the heaviest things they carry, and the rest of it is spent making something light. I am better at each because of the other.

My works are ‘places’ as much as they are paintings. Somewhere warm and quiet or bright and whimsical, often full of creatures, and whatever plants are growing in my world at the time. Where every animal is - as far as I am concerned - a friend of mine. (I did have to be warned against trying to cuddle the bears when I lived in Montana). Painting is how I work out where I am; what is living here, what season it is, who I am among. It connects me.

Make of any of my work whatever you like. It’s none of my business – that’s your story, and I have mine.

Buy a painting because it does something to you. Because the colours are right. Because you keep finding things in it. Because the bird in the corner is one you grew up with and you weren't expecting to see it today. Those are all real reasons, and there is no better one.