The practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner.

Carl Jung, The Red Book (Liber Novus)

Artist’s statement

I am an emerging artist working on Gadigal land and a graduate of the National Art School. My intention is to blend scholarly enquiry with field research to investigate how magic is being redefined in contemporary art and moving away from historical marginalisation. I use magic as a platform to create encounters with alternative cosmologies, knowledge systems and different modes of perception.

My work draws on the writings of the contemporary philosopher Federico Campagna. He writes of a mirror world called magic, a spectral realm that co-exists alongside this one and to access this other world requires a shift in our reality settings. In many esoteric traditions magic can be understood as a set of practices concerned with engaging realities that lie beyond ordinary perceptual limits, operating at the threshold between the known and the unknowable.

In Campgna’s magic, the world is centred around the ineffable which lies at the heart of existence. I respond to this idea by building a surface that employs subtle tonal shifts and a limited palette which hover on the edges of perception; simultaneously emerging and dissolving. The elusive figurative elements are derived from the tarot to engage with an art historical continuum connected to magical ideas that emerged in the Renaissance and continue into the contemporary era.

My paintings are not seeking to achieve a representational outcome, instead painting and magic converge as practices that operate at the edge of perception, not to resolve uncertainty but to allow the viewer to dwell within it.