Barnacles at Barn Hill

Barnacles at Barn Hill continues my exploration of the intertidal zone—an ever-changing meeting place between land and sea. This work reflects on the resilience and quiet persistence of barnacles, creatures that cling to rock and reef amid relentless tides. Their layered, calcified forms mirror the process of painting itself: surfaces built up, eroded, and renewed through time.

At Barn Hill in the Kimberleys of WA where I reside, I was drawn to the subtle shifts between permanence and flux—the barnacles’ clinging contrasted to shifting tides. The work captures this tension, translating textures of the coastal environment into abstract rhythms of mark and colour. Like the tide, each layer holds traces of what has been and what will emerge again.
This painting is a meditation on endurance and adaptation, and on finding beauty within nature’s smallest, most steadfast forms.