Held States is a series shaped by pressure rather than release.

These works emerged slowly, through layering, covering, eroding, and holding back. Instead of expressive marks pushing outward, the surfaces accumulate restraint — colour laid down, softened, obscured, and partially withheld. The tension in the series comes not from drama, but from what is contained.

There are landscapes we visit, and landscapes we carry. For me, Rangitoto has always belonged to the second kind — a shape that settles into memory and becomes part of how you see the world. Its calm, unmistakable silhouette has watched over so many moments in my life that it eventually found its way into my art. Not as a background, but as a quiet companion to the women who appear in this new portrait series.

There are some paintings that don’t arrive all at once. They gather themselves slowly — a wash of muted colour one morning, a shift of light the next, a small intuition that lingers until it insists on becoming form.

I came across a note in one of my old journals recently — a line I must have jotted down years ago:

“…taking a figurative image to the verge — but just short — of abstraction gives it a mysterious and compelling tension.”