Collection: IN THE BEGINNING

I began this collection before I knew I was beginning it.

It started with four paintings that felt somehow different from what had come before. I was drawn toward simpler shapes, repeated marks and a more restrained palette, without quite knowing where they were taking me. Looking back, I can see how much of that work was already rooted in memories of places I had visited, and in a fascination with the ways artists have always found ways to make meaning from the world around them.

While travelling through Australia, David and I visited as many galleries and museums as he could reasonably be expected to endure, and I was deeply moved by Indigenous Australian art. I was drawn to the storytelling within it—the way simple shapes, lines and repeated patterns can suggest people, animals, landscapes, movement and memory. I had similar feelings during an earlier trip to Tanzania, where I was struck by the beauty of handmade objects created by local artists, often inspired by the landscape and wilderness surrounding them.

Those impressions stayed with me. Slowly, almost without my noticing, some of those marks and ideas began to find their way into my own work. I’m not trying to recreate what I saw. Instead, I think I’m responding to something much older and more universal: our instinct to make marks, to find patterns, to tell stories, and to make sense of the world through what we create with our hands.

IN THE BEGINNING is also about returning to something elemental. I have always loved colour, and I’m accustomed to reaching for the full spectrum, so working with a reduced palette has been both challenging and liberating. The paintings feel quieter to me. More grounded. There is room for repetition, shape and gesture to speak.

Perhaps that is what I find most compelling about this collection. It seems to be taking me back—not backward, but closer to the beginning: to nature, memory, simple marks, and the pleasure of making something with my hands and seeing where it leads.