Additional Information

‘First Contact’ (2025) is an undulating, chromatic encounter between worlds, sensibilities, and systems of understanding. Rendered in large format with lush, fluid brushstrokes, the painting enacts a confrontation not between peoples per se, but between ‘storying systems’ or the geometries of culture. The land appears to be remembering and responding, morphing and dreaming.

Each shape and line in my composition carries equal visual weight, inviting the viewer to trace paths and make meaning within a non-linear visual field. The brushstrokes resemble offerings, negotiations. Undulating forms suggest not only the terrain of headlands and dunes, but a spiritual topography. Colours pulse like ceremonial signals; forms undulate with the sentient memory of Country. Crescent shapes scatter like boomerangs on a spectral beach; a ghostly face in profile emerges from the upper escarpment — part ancestor, part Country, part warning.

Unlike Western perspectivism, this painting instead proposes a different kind of intelligence—embodied, ecological, spiritual, non-dual. This is not a depiction, but a re-storying: the land as witness, as mourner, and as teacher. Ultimately, ‘First Contact’ can be seen as a form of ‘sand talk’ — a visual yarning that carries knowledge across boundaries, allowing the land to speak in tongues of colour and movement.