In the busy city streets of today's world, we get only glimpses of nature: walks along the water, tree-lined streets, urban parks. We seek the oxygen of plants and the sound of water. Surrounded by concrete, fumes, the vibrations of traffic, and piles of rubbish, we humans have moved so far from our ancient environments.

Metropolis Oasis is the escape from the city streets into a world made of smaller worlds. Small vignettes take the audience to different scenes around Australia and Asia: the floodplains of western New South Wales, the natural pools of Kakadu, the gardens in the hills of Hong Kong Island, among others.

This body of work was created in hotel rooms in the bustling megacities of Seoul, Hong Kong, Tainan, and Taipei. The small hotel spaces, nestled amongst other tall buildings, contrasted heavily with the visual landscapes I had in my mind - hence I was determined to give each work the sense of pure escape that is so necessary for people who live in big cities.

To stand in front of a Metropolis Oasis vignette is to be immersed, if momentarily, in a whisper of nature from elsewhere.

Do dichotomies truly exist? Perhaps what we see as black and white is a plethora of shades that are neither. Is ice always white? Is white always clean? Is black truly the absence of colour? If it the absence of colour, is it also the absence of heat? Dichotomies, or perceived dichotomies, are everywhere -

Good vs bad

Black vs white

Night vs Day

Light vs Dark

Hot vs Cold

Nature vs Technology

Science vs Art

Spirituality vs Practicality

Imagination vs Logic

Rich vs Poor

We are fed information via dichotomies from a very young age, as a way to categorise the world we live in and dictate, or explain, human behaviour. Only as we grow do we realise that things are more complex than simply a world of opposites. Contradictions live alongside each other, often bleeding into each other. When the needle swings to the other side, what happens during the momentum? Is any dichotomy truly real, or are we just living between the extremes of darkest and lightest greys?

Even the yin and yang symbol has a drop of its opposite inside each half. On planet earth, our little corner of the universe, we live and play and exist in all the shades of dark and light. Only deep in outer space can we find a true black – a total lack of light, and a true white – a combination of all visible colours. Even in the starkest of contrasts we can find that perhaps things are not as black and white as they seem.

Brief Respite is a collection of works whose purpose is to create ephemeral moments of softness for the brain, similar to the feeling of seeing natural geological formations of rock striations such as cliff-faces and canyons, marble slabs, semi-precious stones, windswept sandstone...

The theme is based around the chronic migraines that permeate my daily life - the creation of each was work a brief respite from either the symptoms of migraine (excruciating pain, sensitivity to light and sound, sensitive skin, nausea, fatigue, brainfog), or the side effects of the treatment (stiff neck, constricted sternum, lethargy, shallow breathing).

Each work is created to imitate carved stone in some way - clay was used to form the drapes and ripples, and this was all covered in poured paint. Pouring paint is a method of applying paint to the canvas that relies on the molecular properties of the paint and gravity to form natural movement of colour - the same natural process that can be found in the geology of the earth's crust.

May each piece of art bring a brief respite to the overloaded brain.