This series began by extending my wood carving techniques and transposing them into the tape stencils used to mask textured heavy acrylic paints.

 

Shapes and specific colours were arranged and layered to create configurations which prompt the feel of a place and time. A bit like arranging and layering individual sounds in a piece of music to generate a new sound comprised of the combined individual elements.

 

Titles for this series of paintings were usually taken from colloquial New Zealand slang with a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour. I also used compressed ply as a painting surface – compressed ply being a commonly used raw building material across the country – as it was important to fix the works within a proposed notion of what New Zealand is materially and conceptually.