The contrariety of beauty and ugliness, tenderness and fear, desire and anxiety runs through all of my work, challenging ideas of the body in art, cognitive functionality, notions of the erotic, and systems of control. The Latrobe Valley in Gippsland Australia in which I have spent much of my life, the centre of the brown coal power industry in Victoria, and the strangely menacing aesthetic of this environment provides an apt metaphor for the dissonance occurring within my own body with the progression of my disease (early on-set Parkinson's disease). Within and without, the horror and beauty exist in a symbiotic relationship, intermingled with fear and a deep love and acceptance of the place as an essential part of my identity.
