Solo exhibition at 'Chapter House Lane' (an art space embedded in the backside of Catholic Cathedral in Melbourne), 2015.

Notes:
- Charismatic Catholicism is a sect of the Christian religion typified by its concern with supernatural gifts of the holy spirit, called Charisms. The "gifts" include Speaking in tongues, Resting in the spirit, Healing powers and Prophetic vision. Sometimes, to the believer, the Holy Spirit appears as a floating flame, sometimes as a swooping dove with a trail of ribbons. Like all magic, the manifestation of the gifts relies on group energy, a willing transference of belief among a crowd.

- A view from the passenger window of olive and tan scrub, a slight rise of dry bush and sand, dotted with thin swaying gums and a hard shipping container-cum-billboard with the words painted: New Land For Sale. The land isn't new, just the sign. Reality as realty by layering; establishing boundaries, pouring foundations and coating surfaces.

- When performing Glossolalia, or Speaking In Tongues, spoken language is pushed past its limit of rationality, exoticising speech into poetic abstraction. It requires a loosening of the lips and a freeing of the tongue. Coming out from "within", belief runs deep. As a child, an indoctrinated Charismatic, I practiced Speaking In Tongues in the shower, twisting my rubber mouth into unfamiliar shapes to make Latinesque sounds so that when I Got the Gift I'd feel more comfortable to use it. Everyone who Speaks In Tongues does it differently, but if you listen to the same people doing it enough, certain sounds and phrases recur. You hear something that isn't easily translated. Words loosen into forms that articulate meaning aesthetically. Meaning here is perhaps little more than what it is to speak without meaning, and likewise what it is to listen intently without gleaning.

- Picking flowers is a way to take colour into your own hands. Colour Walks, It crawls right off the trees and in behind the fingernails. A bed of flowers in a public space is like a decorative shield, a pretty claim to land. Plants can use their flowers to distract from the dirty earth beneath them while they quietly burrow deeper and deeper into it with their wet slithering roots, 'nauseating and naked like vermin.' (Bataille)

- While making the paintings for this show I listened with headphones to various audio books written by my uncle. He writes hard sci-fi that involves complicated physics and abstract mathematical principles, which can be difficult to digest when printed on a page, but are somehow easier to follow through listening. A lot of the stories describe the possibilities of inhabiting new spaces and times, of existing on planes as data, leaving our bodies behind.