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My practice originates in a long-standing fascination with how the mind constructs meaning from incomplete information. With a background in literacy teaching — including work with deaf students using sign language — I became increasingly aware of the brain’s remarkable capacity to fill gaps, test hypotheses, and repair missing data. Meaning was often not fully contained in the signal itself; it had to be constructed by the cortex.

These experiences shaped my interest in how people cope cognitively when certainty is unavailable. In many contexts — whether linguistic, perceptual, or emotional — information may be fragmented, ambiguous, or partially obscured. Yet meaning does not disappear. Instead, it must be inferred, reconstructed, and sometimes only partially resolved.

While these ideas can be discussed conceptually, my work is grounded in the belief that some aspects of cognition cannot be adequately communicated through language alone. I see art-making as a genuine contribution to conversations about cognition and metacognition by allowing thinking to be felt, tested, and negotiated rather than simply described.

My early practice emerged from an intuitive process of making sense of experience through visual language. Much of this work was produced prior to the publication of Art From Adversity (2013), during a period in which abstraction provided a way of exploring ideas without reliance on narrative or explicit explanation.

Following the publication of Art From Adversity, my practice increasingly intersected with psychiatry and mental health research, leading to a sustained relationship with the CADE Clinic (Clinical Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation) in Sydney, where a collection of my early paintings is on permanent display.

Some early paintings had visual qualities that can be understood as an early form of brain-related abstraction. These works deliberately explored visual structures suggestive of networks, branching pathways, and energetic flow.

My current practice has evolved from this foundation. The earlier work opened questions about perception, meaning, and the mind; the more recent work approaches these questions through a deliberate conceptual investigation of cognition itself.

In this sense the practice has shifted from early intuitive explorations of mind and brain toward the construction of visual models of cognition, extending across conceptual abstraction, painting, text-based works, and object-based installations.

In retrospect, many of these early concerns align closely with what is now described in cognitive science as Bayesian inference — the idea that the brain continually updates its understanding of the world by combining prior expectations with incoming signals.