Synthesis of Memory
Acrylic & charcoal on canvas 2025
120cm x 95cm
“Synthesis of Memory” is an imagined landscape built from fragments of place and recollection. Its palette of iron-red earth and olive greens was inspired by a friend’s photographs of Uluru, where the scorched desert tones and resilient trees struck me with their vivid contrasts. I introduced a body of water as a mirror, distorting and blurring the surrounding landscape in the same way memory and dreams shift and reshape over time.
The work began after a plein-air workshop in Wendy Whiteley’s Secret Garden on Guringai Country. Although I never met Brett Whiteley, my father, his cousin, often spoke of him with pride, recounting mischievous school days and time in his London studio. After my father’s passing from dementia last year, those stories felt newly alive. Sitting in the Whiteley garden, they folded grief, inheritance and place into the act of painting.
This work is not a depiction of the garden, nor of Uluru, but a synthesis of place and imagination, lineage and loss, oil and acrylic, past and present.
Synthesis of Memory
Acrylic & charcoal on canvas 2025
120cm x 95cm
“Synthesis of Memory” is an imagined landscape built from fragments of place and recollection. Its palette of iron-red earth and olive greens was inspired by a friend’s photographs of Uluru, where the scorched desert tones and resilient trees struck me with their vivid contrasts. I introduced a body of water as a mirror, distorting and blurring the surrounding landscape in the same way memory and dreams shift and reshape over time.
The work began after a plein-air workshop in Wendy Whiteley’s Secret Garden on Guringai Country. Although I never met Brett Whiteley, my father, his cousin, often spoke of him with pride, recounting mischievous school days and time in his London studio. After my father’s passing from dementia last year, those stories felt newly alive. Sitting in the Whiteley garden, they folded grief, inheritance and place into the act of painting.
This work is not a depiction of the garden, nor of Uluru, but a synthesis of place and imagination, lineage and loss, oil and acrylic, past and present.
