Beautiful Boundaries — The Portal Series emerges from walking-based research across Mexican cities, including Mexico City, Aguascalientes, Mérida and Guanajuato where I documented the decorative surface languages of vernacular architecture. The rejas (iron grilles and bars) that guard windows, doors and balconies, intricate tilework, brightly coloured walls, torn posters and layered urban surfaces recur across these geographically distinct locations as a persistent visual language encoding histories of labour, aspiration and cultural memory.
These forms are never merely decorative. Beautiful and controlling simultaneously, they soften boundaries without dissolving them. They let light through while holding distance in place.
Working with photographic fragments gathered during urban walks, I layer these surfaces into large-scale digital collages printed directly onto acrylic — luminous, translucent objects that hover between image and screen. At the centre of each work sits a circular portal: part window, part lens, part mandala.
Terra Incognita is a series of abstract paintings developed in response to terrazzo — a material I began noticing everywhere in my built environment, from ageing suburban floors to its re-emergence as a design trend in gentrified cafe’s and contemporary kitchens and bathrooms. Originally developed in Venice and brought to postwar Australia by Italian craftsmen, terrazzo became part of the material world of the migrant generation who settled Melbourne's inner and western suburbs in the 1950s and 60s — the same generation as my grandparents.
Looking closely at terrazzo's aggregate surfaces, I began tracing and abstracting its forms into layered fields of colour. The chips and fragments mutate into new configurations — maps of an unknown territory, familiar and strange simultaneously.
Like much of my work, Terra Incognita finds abstraction hiding in the overlooked surfaces of everyday life.
Working with layered fields of colour, the terrazzo forms mutuate into new maps of an unknown territory.
2022, oil on linen, 100cm x 80cm
2021, oil on linen, 60cm x 40cm
2022, oil oil linen, 100cm x 80cm
2022, oil on linen, 80cm x 70cm
2022, oil on linen 100cm x 80cm
Viral Movie is a meditative found footage film composed of scenes from dystopian and outbreak cinema — including Contagion, The Quiet Earth, Stalker, The Road, Outbreak, 28 Days Later, and The Omega Man, among others. The film unfolds slowly and deliberately, allowing familiar images to take on new weight in the shadow of COVID-19.
Drawing from a wide range of cinematic responses to crisis, Viral Movie registers the emotional contours of the pandemic and lockdown: fear, dread, numbness, disorientation, distrust, and the desperate desire to escape.
Viral Movie was created as part of a collaborative installation made with multi-disciplinary artist, Karleng Lim. Conceived through dialogue during the pandemic, Influence reflects on the fractured emotional landscape of lockdown with its deep impacts and anxieties around health, control, and connection. Structured across three zones — Body, Mind, and Soul — the installation weaves together familiar domestic rituals such as sourdough baking, the incessant news cycle, and a sensory retreat space to explore how we metabolised crisis, both individually and collectively.
No Limit introduces the Hedgewitch — trickster, wanderer, and urban spell-caster. Drawing on folk traditions of herbalism and solitary magic, she is reimagined as a 21st-century mystic navigating the psychic and physical boundaries of contemporary cities. She enters spaces shaped by wealth, order and control, disrupting them through gestures of curiosity, humour and embodied play.
In folklore, hedge witches lived on the edge of villages, working with plants and unseen forces, moving between the cultivated and the wild. This Hedgewitch occupies a similar threshold — traversing sites marked by formal landscaping and architectural dominance. Her head is a plastic topiary sphere: the clipped, controlled garden form made strange and worn as a head.
She wanders through Venice's labyrinthine alleys and the hedge maze at Villa Pisani, stands among the tetrapods on the Alexandria breakwater, and appears in a Cairo hotel garden with the Pyramids behind her — footage filmed during my father's first return to Egypt in over fifty years. Her costume, printed with photographic fragments collected during urban walks, is part court jester, part urban camouflage.
The installation combines three-channel video, suspended acrylic discs and a large wall collage made from the same imagery as the costume. The video plays across sculptural screens built from shipping container panels, anchored by a maze of tiled blocks and hazard tape — the boundary forms of the city reassembled as theatre.
No Limit
2019
Three-channel video installation
Digital video (8:50 min, looped), acrylic discs, photographic collage, mannequin with custom costume, tiled blocks, shipping container panels and steel, hazard tape
Soundscape by Lola Paulova
First exhibited at VCA Masters Exhibition, Martin Myer Arena, Southbank, Melbourne.
Drift Mobile ( Berlin)
Drift Mobile is a suspended installation of acrylic discs printed with digital collages made from photo fragments gathered during urban walks in Berlin. Hung as a mobile, the discs slowly rotate and shift — catching light, casting reflections, revealing and obscuring as viewers move around them.
The work follows the same logic as the walks that produced it: accumulation, fragmentation, the city reassembled from what caught the eye.
Installation view From Where I Stand exhibition, curated by Dr Kim Donaldon, VCA Artspace, Melbourne 2019
Genius Loci refers to a place's atmosphere or "spirit of place." This work is a response to Toorak, Melbourne — exploring the associations and atmosphere of a contemporary suburban locale seen through the eyes of an outsider.
Manicured gardens, hedges, high walls and topiary inspire a reflection on class, colonialism, and 17th century European garden design and its values of control over nature. This work playfully appropriates that landscape in a quasi-mystical simulacra.
The spirit of place is personified and sits on a plinth. Some materials were sourced from hard rubbish, and the plastic topiary balls are available at Bunnings.
Part of an exhibition curated by Dr. Kate Just, titled “The Prosumers” at Creative Spaces Vitrines, Melbourne 2019
Materials: Plastic topiary balls, walker, hand held leaf scoops, plastic trellis, broom, mannequin, cast plaster cricket stumps, oak dowels, collage printed fabric, wood, steel, oil burner, Dimensions Variable.
Steel, ply, plastic hedge tile.
Photographic series and exhibition at Chamber Presents 2017 Archival pigment prints
Customer Parking Only is a photographic series made across Melbourne, Los Angeles, Berlin, Texas and New Mexico — strip malls, empty lots, defunct signage, sun-scorched facades. Spaces built for commerce and slowly being abandoned by it.
Working with a deadpan eye, the series finds accidental beauty in the unglamorous and the overlooked. The title, borrowed from ubiquitous car park signs, hints at the conditional nature of access to these spaces: you're welcome, but only if you're consuming.
