The Art of Surface

Texture and Colour in Spatial Design

May 15th - June 6th 2025

This exhibition emerged from a deeply personal journey, shaped by stillness, space, and recovery.

For over a decade, I often lived unable to leave my front door or was largely immobile. During that time, I spent countless hours observing white walls and shifting light, watching how space held, shaped, and interacted with the objects and architecture I struggled to move within. A formative chapter unfolded in a Coburg townhouse during COVID: an artist's home filled with books, art, and intentional design. It revealed how profoundly space can affect the mind and being. I'd only lived with that much proximity to art when I had access to studios.

Later, a high-rise apartment offered a new perspective—from the 56th floor, and metaphorically, through a renewed sense of possibility. Its safety, spatial design, and considered interiors allowed me to mentally, emotionally, and physically move beyond the relentless effects of complex trauma. That experience showed me how design as art can transform not just how we function, but how we are—how we feel, exist, and connect.

I also spent time grounded—literally—reconnecting with surfaces: floorboards, tiles, and alternative solutions in carpeted spaces. Slowly, I understood texture as an interface between body, space, and mind.

This work responds to Melbourne Design Week's theme, Design the world you want. It explores how subtle shifts in light, colour, and texture can transform how we experience space and ourselves.

At the start of 2025, I became fixated on the number five: five works beginning with Alter—five as the number of change, culminating in 25. Alter, Cosmic Recurrence, Tomorrow's Door, Echo and Becoming form a quiet transformation manifesto, beginning with reimagining air-dry clay, circles, and blank surfaces.

Alongside this, I began collaborating with filmmaker and artist Samuel Galloway. What started as a documentary evolved into video art, photography, and light installation, centred in this exhibition on the moth as a symbol of transformation. Drawn instinctively toward light, the moth mirrors the journey from darkness into possibility. Sam's work offers a poetic counterpoint—a parallel exploration of change, embodiment, and renewal.

This exhibition was developed during an artist residency at The Gladstone, now home to Romulus Gallery. With practical assistance from Scott Ross, we activated a space in transition: one Power Point, no sink, and a mural already there. We worked with what we had, supported by The Gladstone / FB Ideas and proudly auspiced by Arts Access Victoria, drawing on light, texture, vision, and lived experience.

The work in this exhibition was created across Southbank and South Melbourne, where I live and hold my artist residency, on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation. I pay deep respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge the long, ongoing lineage of storytelling, spatial knowledge, texture, wisdom, and light held in Country for countless generations. As an artist working with space, surface, and transformation, I recognise this as part of a much older, deeper continuum of care and creative expression.

The Art of Surface is about more than aesthetics. It's about the tactile, emotional, and psychological surfaces that shape how we live. It asks how we design the world and let it hold us.