Apophenie Junk Pile 
June 18 - July 4, 2026

Red Gallery, Fitzroy North, Melbourne. 

 

Apophenia: the tendency to draw connections between seemingly unrelated things.

 

Apophenie Junk Pile is composed of fabric paintings in various stages of contemplation; experimental dyeing projects, concept studies, resuscitated old things and newborns.  

There are paintings for longing - longing for the bush and big skies. Paintings for dirt and the stratum of the earth and the damp and the worms. Paintings for the paintings, for tactility’s sake and keeping hands idle. Paintings for my queerness and my corporeality, to map my beating heart and flesh wrapped bones. Paintings for the mess we’re in, for the anger and the depravities, for the trying and failing to figure it all out. Paintings are all apophenies; threads that tie together all these loose things pinging in and out of my orbit.

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I am a scavenger. I’ve long considered my studio a junk pile; a place to stow away ideas and excitement and vanity and shameful sorrow. Everything in my studio is considered a material – even beloved finished paintings are re-worked, cut and stolen from, shit ones are rarely discarded. I’ve inherited this way of working from my father, who raised me on an owner-builder property where resources were scarce, always recycled, and DIY was non-negotiable. In his vision building and making stuff responded to necessity and if a material had a more pressing purpose elsewhere, it was pulled from where it was and re-used. The junk pile isn’t a place for discarded items, it’s where things lie idle.