top of page

ABOUT

I am a multimedia artist living in Titirangi, Auckland. My work explores the preservation of memory through images and how stories shift and transform each time they're told, painted, or photographed.

​

My thirty-year practice moves between painting, photography, and digital composite work. Three distinct ways of working, in conversation with each other.

​

My photography spans street, portrait and abstract work, and I am drawn to colour, light and form. I try to see familiar things in different ways. I enjoy abstracting shapes from the ordinary and taking the everyday out of context.

​

My paintings are figurative and concerned with memory, storytelling and psychological landscapes. My work navigates the space between past and present, figure and ground. I work from found images and personal archives, using them as a point of departure rather than a fixed reference. My work draws on influences ranging from Matisse and Diebenkorn to Richard Lewer and Kaye Donachie.

 

Working in a variety of mediums including oil, acrylic, watercolour, Indian ink, drawing and collage, layering is essential to both my process and aesthetic. Each layer alters and partially obscures what came before.

​

My digital composites also work with layers of painting, photography, or a combination of both. I explore how these elements blur and bleed into each other, creating a dreamlike distance, a sense of time passing or collapsing.

​

I'm fascinated by the act of retelling.  An old photograph sparks a memory; layering paint transforms what was there before;  colour shifts the tone and flavour of a story. The images I make are open-ended. Each viewer brings their own interpretation, their own memory, to complete the narrative in a unique way.

​

​​

Karen Jarvis, Wynyard Quarter, 2025

My work has been shown in group exhibitions including Northart 2019, and I was a finalist in the Parkin Drawing Prize. I have published two art books with Little Artbook Press: Lost and Found (2025), a collection of oil paintings, and reFRAMED (2025), a curated photography collection.

 

I hold a Master of Creative Writing (Honours) from AUT and a Diploma of Design in Visual Arts from Unitec. I have worked as a biographer, memoir mentor, children's performer and director. I have written three privately commissioned biographies and a children's book published by Pan Macmillan Australia. My interdisciplinary background, spanning visual arts, narrative, and performance, continues to inform how I construct and deconstruct stories through image-making.

​

​

Visit my Photobook Memoir website for more background info →

Photo: Scott Crawford @scotfreenz 
bottom of page