Artist Statement

‘inward’

adjective

directed or proceeding towards the inside; coming in from the outside, directed towards the self, centre of a place.

The process of searching inward towards self began in late 2019, when I left my art studio in Bushwick South, in the Northern Beaches of Sydney. My studio was a sacred place and a shelter, where I could meet my naked soul and all it entailed. The difficult decision was made for the greater good; bringing the studio home prompted me to reflect on many things and steered me towards a focus on the internal environment: a precursor to what was about to come.

Slowly, I began moving away from the cellular structures that dominated my ‘In Scope’ series and started diving into the spiritual plane. The passing of a dear friend from terminal cancer and my own brush with mortality were catalysts for the development of the ‘Inward’ series.

Reflections on our temporal lives and how we approach death brought me a renewed sense of the ‘here’ and ‘now’. It pushed me to evaluate how attached we are to our mortal bodies. The ‘big pause’ linked to the pandemic followed this line of thought, which inundated many conversations with my patients. It seemed that we all needed to stop and talk about what we value in life. These conversations became insightful, and I noticed how many of my patients were taken by surprise by a diagnosis, shocked and unprepared. They needed to express their fear of illness, not to mention death.

Being mortal means coping with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by our genes and cells. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.

As people returned to the streets after the isolation periods of 2020, my practice started to shift with the world returning to a new known “normal”. The colours and shapes, taken from here and there, from this and that, resulted in a colourful invitation to reflect on the positivity of our lives.

During this insightful process, the self, the artist, and the clinician in me had finally met.