Adelaide Cerntal School of Art Gallery, 1998

This exhibition marked my first year out of art school, my first solo show, and the culmination of a year long residency at Central Studios, attached to the Adelaide Central School of Art. Fresh from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, I arrived in Adelaide with more questions than certainties: what it meant to paint, how a painting might acknowledge its own making, and how to find a position within the long and complicated conversations that painting carries with it.

The works produced during this period were process driven abstract paintings that began with a handful of simple marks. From there each canvas unfolded through a sustained dialogue of adjustment, refusal and rethinking. I worked on all of them simultaneously, allowing them to influence one another while still developing their own idiosyncrasies. The group held together as a loose family, interrelated in scale and time, but each staking out its own logic. Not knowing was central to the method; the paintings evolved by leaning into uncertainty rather than avoiding it.

Alongside these works I kept a quieter, parallel project: a self portrait repainted every week for the duration of the residency. Clothing, light, mood and shifting appearance all left their trace, accumulating into a layered and unresolved record of the year. It also reflected the adjustment from the environment of the VCA to a school with a strong figurative tradition. For the exhibition I hung the portrait upside down, a small gesture to artists such as Georg Baselitz, Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger, whose irreverent approaches to painting were shaping my thinking at the time.

Presented simply under my name and with all works left untitled, the exhibition became an early testing ground for an independent practice, a moment of working out how paintings might think for themselves and how I might think through them.