I am interested in how reality is constructed through the manufacture of stories under the power of commercial prerogatives. Cast-off materials permit me to give new life to what otherwise would be dismissed as rubbish.

Driving around Sydney in my hybrid SUV picking up boxes of excess magazines from households that have advertised them for collection on Facebook Marketplace (a free service available to anyone who has a Facebook account) gives me agency with regard to the material realm. For some works reject photographic prints get repurposed too.

My practice sometimes involves the use of watercolours and collage. These can refer overtly to popular culture, particularly advertising, which takes up such a prominent position in our lives but which is normally ignored by the culture industries.

Advertising on the other hand pays a lot of attention to our culture industries, borrowing styles and tropes freely in order to key into people’s lives. The use of words and collage implicitly suggests a nexus of money and signs since language and the magazines that distribute it in the community are an intimate part of consumer culture. They sustain and are sustained by it as am I.

The “paramontages” expand on these concerns but are professionally printed in Sydney. To make paramontages I repurpose photographs and leverage the functions of a package of free software – which is available for download on the internet without charge, a practice escaping the cash nexus, freeing creative impulses without the burden of financial outlay. Making creative montages with and without words but in both cases layering images and bands of pure colour to form complex works.

My aim is to increasingly bridge the divide between the visual and literary arts. One solo show in New South Wales featured both watercolour and photographic works as well as a book of poetry. The title of the book is ‘Gold 4WD’ as was the name of the show. Plans include a more ambitious show currently under development to go with a book of prose that touches on ideas of the absent father, the death of God, and the failure of the standard postcolonial narrative.