GRADUATION 2025

Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours)

School of Art and Design, Australian National University

I graduated with First Class Honours and was thrilled to receive the following awards and prizes:

2025 Emerging Artist Support Scheme Alliance Française Exhibition Award

2025 Emerging Artist Support Scheme Acquisition Award

2025 Gray Smith and Joan Scott Prize, ANU School of Art and Design

2025 ANU Drawing Prize (Finalist)

Along with other graduating students, I exhibited works (made as part of my Honours project) in the 2025 ANU

Graduating Exhibition.

Scroll down to see images of those works.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work investigates how contemporary abstract painting techniques can be used to evoke atmospheric light effects drawn from both natural and urban landscapes. Rather than aiming to depict a specific location or particular time of day, I blend memories, some clear and others vague, of fleeting moments of atmospheric light.

By combining and adapting methods commonly linked to Hard Edge Painting and Colour Field Painting, I achieve a sense of light, atmospheric haze, spatial depth, and transition across a two-dimensional surface. By introducing a durational element to abstraction, these paintings become meditations on time: the time involved in their creation and the time required for viewers to observe and experience them.

Photo credit for all photos on this page: David Paterson