There is a quarry just a stone's throw from Moonah which has become a sea of curved bitumen and unused cast concrete - the council’s dumping ground for the remnants of their road works. This landscape has become a refuge of mine where I've worked in peace painting away and considering the place my artwork has in our community.

Over the last decade I've worked predominantly in disused and invisible spaces, painting imagined local inhabitants of place and abstracted muscular masks. My silent wanderings in highway runoff pits, forgotten warehouses and inner city waterways are where I experience my strongest sense of place and have become an important refuge from the anxieties of contemporary life. I care deeply about these uninhabited, often buried, invisible urban environments.

As the race for developable land rages onwards, these in-between-spaces are being seen as opportunities to be replaced with townhouses, accommodation and service stations at the hands of developers and the due course of gentrification. But before we lose them to a tide of perfectly aligned prefab concrete, should we consider leaving some of our uninhabited urban spaces, uninhabited?

Bitumen was exhibited at Good Grief Gallery, nipaluna/Hobart, lutruwita/Tasmania in January 2020.