Uncertain Futures

6 layer stencil on cradled MDF
60 x 90cm

Avocados under-fire as the bourgeoisie reasoning that millennials cant afford a house.

This idea is ridiculous, but I kind of couldn’t pass up the opportunity to cut a stencil of this amazing fruit, with all the different textures going on. I wanted to immortalise the avocado with a sale price sticker as a commentary on the fact that there are unattainable goals set for a market that is way beyond reach, and by much more than any amount of exorbitant purchases can take credit for.

The Imperial Hotel

5 layer stencil on cradled board
80 x 106cm

‘Imperial’ is a disjointed landscape painting of a building in regional Victoria. The way that the image appears is meant to mimic how we remember houses or buildings that we grew up with and how we try to piece them together or re-imagine them years after we have stopped seeing or noticing them. ‘Imperial’ plays on the familiarity and nostalgia that I have for Australian architecture, and how these visual cues trigger my sentimentality for the romantic ideal of a ‘forever home’.

Summer time sadness

4 layer stencil on cradled ply
42 x 30cm

This ones a bit of a personal joke, both about the extreme temperatures we get in Australia, and our inability to build anything that is able to deal with the conditions. It pokes fun at the lack of buildings we have that actually suit Melbournes climatic extremes, and my devastation once moving out of my family home of not having adequate cooling.

Broken Home

5 layer stencil on cradled MDF
50 x 40cm

Something about these old decorative tea sets really drew close to ideas of heritage for me, to these traditions of tea drinking and a way of life. The broken shards being mixed up, almost looking like a new house either taking shape and forming or one falling apart in order to have something new replace it. It’s a still life that celebrates this crossing over of tradition with something new.

Buffed

5 layer stencil on cradled board
73 x 61cm

Abandoned

5 layer stencil on cradled board
73 x 61cm

Similarly to part #1 and #2 of the weather board works, which splice the finished and construction phase of the facade, the Buffed and Abandoned works explore more the potential of a construction site, which is the key moment that a building could be anything. Buffed is a representation of the prior site being ‘buffed’, or painted over and deleted, while Abandoned is more about remembering what was there before and the possible ways that it has to be referenced with whatever the finished face is to become.

Weather Board #1

5 layer stencil on reclaimed weather boards, mounted on pine frame
73 x 61cm

Weather Board #2

5 layer stencil on reclaimed weather boards, mounted on pine frame
73 x 61cm

Part #1 and #2 of these weather board works splice together the image of the same site; one whilst under construction, and one once finished. The weather boards alternate, drawing your attention to how the building takes shape behind the fabric facade of construction.

I’ve always been fascinated with the limbo stage of a construction site, where a building, with its tarps and scaffold, hold the potential to become anything. For me this is the most exciting phase of any building, because it holds so much potential and excitement for ‘what could be’, before it becomes set in stone and static once more.

In reality I’ve discovered that no real ‘forever home’ exists, our lives change so much, with the coming and going of members to a family that need to be housed and the spaces required for each member, that the ideal forever home is to some degree always under construction. This is a fairly confronting conclusion for someone studying architecture to come to but it’s true to form in the ephemeral way that buildings exist until they no longer fill their purpose.

Sherbet

5 layer stencil on cradled ply
73 x 58cm

I was so excited for the unveiling of this building, probably because I drove past it so often, but also probably because I have a soft spot for two storey terraces (one of my favourite homes growing up was a terrace house). However, when this facade was revealed behind the layers of hoarding, my excitement deflated a little bit, because the building had taken its final form and would remain static once more.

Heritage Listed

5 layer stencil on Marine Ply
66 x 35cm

Around the corner from one of the many houses I’ve lived in over the years this little house sat on a huge block, abandoned, boarded up, and completely overgrown. I isolated the house outside of its landscape and context because, outside of those things it seemed like a perfectly reasonable, cute little home, not unlike some of the houses I grew up and lived in. But in this new context it really changed the effect that it had in this new landscape and I found that really interesting, that something that existed for so long and had a purpose suddenly becomes obsolet. Like so many homes in Australia, they’re built in the wrong spot on their portion of land, of they aren’t configured to hold the right amount of space. Aside from layout and aesthetic, I’ve thought a lot about ‘Architecture’, our reasoning for using certain materials and have been questioning more and more the difference the existing building has to the one that precedes and succeeds it, like a canvas being painted over multiple times, either over-worked or unfinished. This was one of the first works that I created that really set my ideas on this fine line, between architecture and art.

Erasure

5 layer stencil on Marine Ply
78 x 29cm

Melting Pot

5 layer stencil on Marine Ply
78 x 29cm

Closed for Renovations

5 Layer Stencil on Cradled board
40 x 40cm

An icon shrouded in construction boards. I saw this a lot when traveling overseas visiting monuments and it kind of blew me away. What blew me away more was that I actually enjoyed monuments more in these stages of re-construction. The same goes for buildings that are new and being created. I find this ‘facade’ and veiling of a building really exciting because it is underscored with a feeling of possibility and imagination for what else could exist, it’s a moment of potential and possibility.

Disney Pailings

4 layer stencil fence pailings
36 x 66cm

Obviously there has been a theme through out this show that concerns itself with building materials and the quality that gives a home - I’ve always had a soft spot for weather boards and a picket fence, I’m not sure if its because I grew up living in some houses that had them or if it’s just the aesthetic, but I had to include a fence silhouette because of the connotation the ‘white picket fence’ has when it comes to most peoples dream homes.

Sirius Spires

5 layer stencil on plaster, framed
60 x 60cm

The Sirius Apartments are an iconic Brutalist building designed by Tao Gofers in the 1970s for the Housing Commission. It’s always been one of my favourite buildings in Sydney and in my opinion should have just as many visitors as the Opera House.

A few years ago, the Sirius building was under threat to be sold to a developer, who would level the block and build luxury apartments in its wake.

The National Trust nominated Sirius to be listed on the State Heritage Register, but in August 2016 Mark Speakman, Minister for the Environment announced he was rejecting the advice of the NSW Heritage Council. Stating “I consider that in this case whatever the heritage significance of the Building, even at its highest, this is outweighed by the undue financial hardship its listing would cause to its owners, by diminishing what would otherwise be its sale value, which would potentially represent foregone funds for additional social housing?

Sirius

5 layer stencil on cradled MDF
60 x 60cm

Modern Monument

5 layer stencil on cradled board
85 x 106cm

This work is born out of an idea I had while traveling around Rome, visiting renowned monuments, many of which were under construction and renovation. Upon returning home to Melbourne I wondered more and more about how we treat heritage and the methods we take to look after it. I questioned what sensitivities are taken into account when caring for a monument and whether that effected the value or negated the original value of the site, which would otherwise show its age. I created these digital mash-ups of a few different façades, to question that idea of value and also as way to question how we remember things.

Imperial Monument

5 layer stencil on cradled board
85 x 106cm

Kingsville

Acrylic paint on cradled Ply
50 x 50cm

This is a small-scale study of a larger mural that exists in Kingsville it is also the first artwork of this style and theme that I created. The aim was to capture something that I felt spoke to heritage but defined it artistically, rather than architecturally. I then cropped this recognisable style into a juvenile silhouette of a house. The aesthetic choice in wallpaper point to themes of familiarity and the grey ‘buffed’ sections hint towards the modernisation and adjustment to heritage façades.

Landscape

Acrylic paint on cradled Ply
50 x 50cm

This is a re-creation of a famous Eugene Von Guerard landscape (stylistically, one of my favourite Australian landscape painters), of a waterfall located in the eastern suburbs. I wanted to incorporate a landscape study into these stylistic mash-ups of housing silhouettes as a commentary, not only on architecture but also to the overall landscape, which in an urban sense, is often more understated in terms of design. For this reason the ‘familiar’ aesthetics, such as the wallpapers, are fractured.

Palette

Acrylic paint on cradled Ply
50 x 50cm

This is the second painting in the series, and is a follow up to Kingsville, which was the first work in the series that was created. These two works follow the original theme of utilising familiar stylistic art movements and adjusting them and moulding them into a familiar cut-out/silhouette. They are familiar, but also updated and different. Each painting is a work that falls into the era of the Dutch Golden Age and also Baroque time-lines, which I chose because of where they sit in art history, as building blocks from the Renaissance. Both works are inspired by art movements that celebrated extravagance and ornament, which I think play a huge role in what we are nostalgic for.

Saint ARM of Flemington

4 layer stencil on cradled ply
30 x 30cm

The mystery that surrounds this bubble building in Flemington (an addition by ARM Architecture to the commission flats), is typical of ARM’s work, being highly referential. Their referencing of Oscar Niemeyer’s famous Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, has always made me wonder that they were trying to say by topping such a site with this sort of icon. Similarly to how the Victorian government has dropped money on trying to salvage some kind of face in it’s choice to build these monolithic housing developments and now attempts to adorn them with murals or things that are somewhat meant to right the decision they made to build them, like trying to save a bad cake with decorative icing.

Weatherboard

Oil paint on cradled board
21 x 26cm

I started this new series of works centered around the theme of housing, leaving off where my stencil works left off - exploring them in the style of a still life. This weather board was the first of those works, as a test of developing a medium and considering texture in painting. Although it doesn’t fit the scope as much as the other works it’s really the building block to how I created the whole show, this work was really where it started, testing a new medium a year ago.

Craft

5 layer stencil on archival paper
Edition of 25
38.3 x 57cm

This work is a stencil that I created of a cross stitch work, originally made by my grandmother. I grew up with this work hanging on the walls of my home. As much as I never really liked a lot of the works that hung in my house growing up, and especially most of the works my grandmother had stitched, with their ornate gilded frames, I now have a soft spot for them, as a nostalgic item that reminds me of the person who created them. It’s a strange thing when an object, or artwork takes on a memory you hold of a particular time in your life, and I think this is also common with houses that we live in for long periods of time, they seem to contain the memories that were created there.

This work also celebrates a medium that is often misunderstood or down graded as a ‘craft’ form of art. The parallel I draw to it using the medium of stencils, which also has ties to this craft notion of hobby art, before its resurgence and modernisation in recent times being linked to ‘street art’, it challenges the value we place on an artistic medium.

Forum Window

5 layer stencil on cradled plaster
135 x 156cm

This is one of the older works that I created that was originally painted in the Collingwood Arts Precinct building, its one of the first architectural works that I created for this body of work because the forum has always stood out to me as an understated and extremely iconic building of Melbourne. Its Gothic, but there’s something else to it to that’s unlike anything else, and I think it’s one of the reasons that other architecture of this style seems familiar to me and to speak of home. I’ve always been in awe of how dilapidated but together the facade seemed, like it was barely hanging on. This work really started my fascination with this idea of ephemera in architecture, where as until this moment I’d only ever really thought about it in regards to art.