It’s been said that a poem is emotion distilled.
she thought started with a poem I wrote to Aram, imagining how she might respond to the landscape of the coastal walk at Bondi. I had spent a great deal of time in the location clarifying my own thoughts about it and developing initial studies for the work, but it was when I viewed the landscape from an imagining of my wife’s perspective that these studies began to resolve.
Integral to my creative process was the role of this particular landscape. The work grew straight from the place and it says some of the things I feel about this, and other landscapes. I like the idea that nature cannot be contained, and I've tried to express that. she thought also represents a transition – a time in which the more cerebral nature of my past life in design connects with a deeper level of feelings that inform my art practice.
In this movement between worlds, she thought is helping me to delineate how I’d like to work. The sculpture is a vessel, not only referencing all the craft of sea, sky and land that pass that way, but also a symbolic vessel in which I can travel, helping me to define my ideas and method for the future while navigating toward it. The conceptual vessel is important to me. My own view of the world has been dramatically influenced by the vessels with which I have navigated it, and I suspect that experience is a common one.
she thought brings the accumulation of those experiences into one place and centres them within an iconic Sydney landscape.
