About
I am a storyteller but it took me sixty years to realise this. Like many women, my background is one of transitions, of seeking a place where I feel at home, of pleasing other people and finding my particular niche in the world. I have worked variously as an art gallery curator, teacher, child-care co-ordinator and lawyer. As a single parent I was committed to using my law degree to achieve social justice.
I was born in Wellington in September 1943 and moved to Tasmania at the age of 12. My family lived in a small house in Burnie, a small industrial town. Unusually for this era, when most middle class girls were encouraged to become teachers, secretaries or nurses, I attended university and then worked in two State Art Galleries. I was a Curator of Paintings and Fine Arts at the former National Gallery of South Australia, and an Assistant Director then Acting Director at the then National Gallery of Queensland. After marriage, I had a child and seeking a more family-friendly career, taught at secondary schools in NSW. When my marriage ended, I returned to Tasmania and studied law.
My family are a highly creative group of people. My mother, Marjorie Hill, undertook a Fine Arts Degree under Jack Carington-Smith and then ran the Salamanca Art Gallery for about 16 years, assisted by my brother Charles. My father Bernie, post retirement, had a brief but spectacular career as a naive artist with a very successful exhibition, ‘Himself Surprised’, opened by Jon Olsen. My sister, Pam Poulson, opened Tasmania’s first feminist bookshop in the 1970s and her son, Julien, is the star of the recent film ‘The Cambodian Space Project: not easy rock and roll’. My daughter, Helen, won various awards enabling her to undertake her Masters at the Royal College of Art in London.
I was very much a late starter, though I had over the years worked with ceramics and along with a print maker, Beth Roberts, had an exhibition, ‘Demi-Centurion’, at Tasmania’s Entrepôt gallery when we turned 50. After retirement, I wrote and illustrated children's books for my granddaughter Sophie (books4kids.net.au). This inspired my visual imagination, and I began to paint, working first in acrylics and then transitioning to oil paint, which is now my preferred medium.
I suspect narrative and storytelling is in my blood, but I like tricks in tales where all is not as traditionally told. My Leda and the Swan series do not subscribe to the rape and seduction myth, instead Leda is an empowered figure, with Leda and the white swan in symbiosis. Their progeny is hybrid, the black swans are part of the ‘Leda Down-under’ Southern Hemisphere paintings, and both mourn the loss of Leda.
Vibrant colour and decorative surfaces are important to me. I am inspired by the art of Frida Kahlo, Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan. My style is somewhat naive with caricaturist elements. Over time, I hope to develop a looser more spontaneous way of painting with richer, more vibrant and luminous hues. Like a child, I never stop learning.