I'm here at Ando Gallery. This is a gallery in Tokyo in Japan. It's my first exhibition
here and it's a collaboration between Ando Gallery, Tokyo, and I get an art in Germany.
So there's three different facets to this exhibition and this work, which is Mankind
Nature and Mid, like the title suggests. I've worked a lot with Landscape in the past, but
I haven't introduced figures as yet and that's starting to come into my work. Over the past
few years in Europe I've been studying history painting, looking at the mythologies and stories
of the European masters and the European history. I think landscape looms large in the
consciousness of Australian people and we still come to terms with how to process the
environment and it's a big movement in Australia to paint the landscape and think about those
things that are always present in our everyday life really. Even if you live in the city
it's not very far to you confronted with the kind of wild landscape or the great unknown
sounds silly but the greatness of the land. I've been taking this idea of history painting
and the idea of storytelling and mythology and I've turned that around and I've been
looking at it from a more personal point of view being an Australian and looking at my
own history and myth of my own country and the relationship of man and his environment
and the history of the Europeans coming to Australia into such a foreign and harsh environment
and how they dealt with that situation and many of the early explorers actually perished
in the landscape which has now become part of Australian mythology and part of Australian
psyche also. A way for me to play and evoke the idea of man and his environment on general
terms and how man in general tries to strive to control his environment and overtake his
environment and I think it's particularly poignant at the moment with what's happening
all over the world with the changes in the environment and how we're being impacted by
that to think about this.
