Terra Incognita is a series of abstract paintings developed in response to terrazzo, a material I kept noticing in my everyday built environment from the foyer of the mid-century apartment building I lived in in Toorak to shop floors and verandahs of migrant-era houses in the inner north of Melbourne. Originally developed in Venice in the 15th Century 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. This is the same generation as my mother's family, who arrived in Australia as displaced persons from Eastern Europe after WWII. There's something nostalgic yet whimsical about a material that keeps reinventing itself — one era's ageing  supermarket floor becomes the next era's design trend.

Looking closely at the chips and fragments embedded in terrazzo's surface, I began tracing and abstracting them into layered fields of colour, blowing them up into large interlocking shapes — repeating and reconfiguring them into new compositions that echo the repetitive, almost manufactured logic of terrazzo itself. The shapes mutate as they multiply and become maps of an unknown territory, both familiar and strange.