I came back to painting after years of living a different kind of life. Retail management, motherhood, the daily rhythms of keeping everything running. When I returned to the studio it was not because I had something to say. It was because I had questions I could not answer any other way.

The questions turned out to be about the women in my family. My Nan, my Grama, my Mom. Women who ran businesses, worked railways and hardware stores, raised between three and nine children, and managed households, all at a time when the world had very clear ideas about where women belonged. They moved through it all as though it simply was. No announcement. No apology. And they shaped me completely before I had any idea it was happening.

I am still uncovering how. That is what the paintings are for. Not to arrive at an answer but to keep looking clearly at something that matters. Each time I collage together old family photographs, prepare a wood panel, and begin building up thin layers of oil paint, I am trying to see these women more fully. To understand what they carried and what they passed on without knowing they were passing it on.

The wood panels I paint on connect me to the place I come from. The geometric forms are the rules, made visible so you can begin to figure out how to move within them. The flowers stand in for the women themselves, each bloom a specific person, a specific life that exceeded what was expected of it.

This work is for anyone who has looked at the women before them and felt it. That recognition. That debt. That ongoing process of understanding how completely you were shaped by people who never asked for credit.

My art is the story of a woman searching, observing, and still reconciling the different parts of herself.