What Remains, Continues

Oil, wax pencil & charcoal on linen, framed

I paint the former saw mill at Spring Bay, Triabunna, because it demands attention—not for spectacle, but for the traces of time it holds. The site is both subject and condition: a landscape shaped by use, pause, recovery and return. T.S. Eliot’s notion that time present and time past are held within time future underpins the work, suggesting history is not behind us but active within what comes next.

I am drawn to how environments absorb industry and slowly reconfigure themselves. This painting attends to residue—shifts in surface, rhythm and balance that persist long after activity has ceased. The site’s current, more careful inhabitation introduces a different tempo of restraint and coexistence, shaping a composition where density gives way to openness, and disruption meets moments of calm.

The painting is built through layering, abrasion and return. I work wet into dry, sanding and reworking the surface so earlier decisions remain visible. This process echoes cycles of growth and erosion, and the industrial logic of accumulation and removal. Materiality carries its own history.

For me, landscape painting is not distant observation but implication—staying with a place that has been altered, endured, and carefully re-inhabited, holding past and present together without resolution.