You currently have an exhibition The Puppet Show at Manly Art Gallery and Museum. How does The Puppet Show reflect the wider themes and methods that run through your artistic practice?

At its core, my work is about how we adapt to digital life. I think of my exhibitions like short stories where each painting operates like a sentence within a longer narrative about how digital technologies and hyperconnectivity shape our beliefs and behaviours.

For this exhibition I’ve used the visual grammar of theatre to explore who is pulling the strings in our relationship with the technologies we create. I’ve transformed the gallery into a theatre set by creating huge vinyl prints that create the illusion of a stage with red velvet curtains and box seats. 

What was the starting idea for The Puppet Show, and how did the connection between theatre and AI first come together for you?

Simmering away in the background of my work is my interest in the hidden forces that nudge our behaviours and, at times, the course of history. While making this show I was thinking a lot about how power works in the world. 

I’ve been reading the Robert Caro multi-volume biographies on Lyndon B Johnson. I’m fascinated how power brokers, the real geniuses at it, control the course of history by ‘pulling the strings’. Several leaders over the course of history have been true masters at this, and the blind pursuit of goals started to remind me of some of the ways AI safety advocates describe emotionless machines that stop at nothing to achieve their objectives. 

I was curious to ‘peek behind the curtain’ at how power can accumulate right in front of our eyes. When we watch a puppet show, we know it’s not real, but we want to believe the illusion. For me this desire for illusion is a fascinating human trait. 

Even though the exhibition theme explores digitization and the influence of AI, everything is made by hand. Why did you choose to work this way and what are you hoping the juxtaposition of the medium and subject matter will highlight?

I have a longstanding interest in the mixture of the real and the unreal. My first art crushes were the surrealist painters of the 1920s and 30s. I still love the ways their imagery was odd and dreamlike, but the lighting and shadows follow the laws of physics, making it seem more ‘real’. 

A few years ago, I started developing this mixture of the real and the unreal in my practice. I begin a painting from my imagination, but then I recreate or sculpt what I’ve painted in Maya, a 3D Software program so I can move a light source around and observe realistic shadows in my imagined worlds. Artists have been doing this for centuries by creating maquettes to observe while they paint. I’ve never thought to exhibit these 3D models because they are just for me to use as a paint reference, but when  the curators of The Puppet Show, encouraged me to do something different for this show, I tried to think of ways I could incorporate these ‘sculptures’ I had been creating that no one would normally see. 

Artists work in lots of different ways these days, many use AI to generate imagery in their work, but for me that would mean outsourcing the part I love the most. I like coming up with the ideas and building them myself. The theatre was modelled manually in 3D software; the paintings are rendered slowly in oil. This human labour becomes a counterpoint to the speed and scale of machine-generated narratives and imagery.

Why do you think storytelling still matters today, especially at a time when machines are beginning to generate stories alongside us?

I think storytelling is fundamental to what makes us human. We've been gathering around fires telling stories for thousands of years. It's how we made sense of the world, by sharing our fears and hopes. Those fireside gatherings evolved into amphitheaters, then cinemas, television, computers, and smartphones. Now all that narrative tradition is being absorbed into large language models like ChatGPT. So, the question becomes: what happens to human culture when AI gets baked into all aspects of our lives, including our creativity and imagination.

There's an idea from Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens that really resonates with me: that human civilization is basically built on shared fictions. Things like money, nations, corporations, even concepts like justice, none of these physically exist, but we all agree to believe in them, and that collective belief is what allows us to cooperate on a massive scale. Stories aren't just entertainment; they're the infrastructure of how we organise society.

But stories also work on a personal level. A good story pulls you into someone else's perspective, expands your understanding of the world, and maybe even shifts the way you see things. That's powerful. And I think as machines start generating more narratives, we need to ask ourselves what changes when the stories shaping our culture come from non-human sources. That's really what The Puppet Show is exploring—what's at stake as we hand over this very human technology to machines.

You're offering mentoring sessions as part of your exhibition at Manly Art Gallery & Museum. Can you tell us about these sessions and why supporting other artists is important to you?

Art is a difficult, or maybe I should say a nearly impossible pursuit to do in isolation. Other artists have certainly propped me up at many different points in my life. I like to pay that forward. 

I think it's important to make art. Sometimes it seems superfluous when the world appears to be crumbling around us, but when you think about some of the most meaningful and memorable things in our lives (apart from friends and family of course), it's often things like our favourite music, films, books, art, etc. My favourite works of art bring something immeasurably wonderful to my life. I think what people can create with their own hands can be profoundly meaningful. If I can find a way to encourage that, I will. 

These sessions are supportive and informal chats about a piece of art someone is working on, but perhaps isn’t sure how to resolve, and could use another pair of eyes on it. These sessions could also be more general about art career advice. I leave it up to the participants to tell me what would be most useful for them to talk about.