About

I'm a painter based in Tāmaki Makaurau, New Zealand, working primarily in oil on canvas. My work begins with landscape — specifically the places where land loses its certainty.

The wild surf beaches of West Auckland's Waitākere coast — Piha, Karekare, Muriwai — are the heart of my current practice. These are not gentle places. They are sites of force and exposure, where black volcanic sand meets open ocean and the light shifts without warning. The paintings in my Black Sands series are large-scale responses to this coastline, built up through gestural, physical mark-making that tries to hold something of the energy of the place rather than simply describe it.

An earlier body of work, my Vanishing in Green series, turned to a quieter, more domestic landscape — the suburban streets and overgrown margins of Birkdale on Auckland's North Shore. Working in acrylic on wood panel, these smaller works explored the edges of the ordinary: the places where the city trails off into vegetation, where the man-made gives way to something slower and less defined.

Together, the work is concerned with presence — the particular quality of light, weight, and atmosphere that makes a place feel irreducibly itself. Painting, for me, is a way of paying attention to that.

I have been studying at the Browne School of Art since 2023, and have exhibited at venues including the NZ Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington, Mairangi Arts Centre, and the Tasman National Art Awards.