Artipodean

Tuesday 26 May 2026

TLDR

24 hand-painted abstract portraits paired with para-fictional speakers and testimonals shaped by research, community knowledge, and lived experience

Honouring HIV Long Term Survivors on HIV Long Term Survivors Awareness Day on 5 June #HLTSAD

Witness: honouring HIV Long Term Survivors

STORIES: Witness presents 24 hand-painted gouache portraits of HIV long-term survivors, honouring decades of survival for HIV Long Term Survivors Awareness Day (5 June).

The collection represents people living with HIV across Australia, Rwanda, India, Russia, Ukraine, Vietnam, Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan, spanning diagnoses from 1984 to 2002. It honours those who have lived with HIV for decades, who buried friends and lovers, who waited years for medicine that would keep them alive. These are people who were told they had months to live and are now in their 60s and 70s. People who contracted HIV before effective treatment existed. People born with the virus who have never known life without it.

Parafictive personas

These parafictional narratives are not real people. While inspired by the real experiences of those who've lived decades with HIV, each individual portrayed is an invented persona grounded in the historical accuracy of the lived experience. The names, stories, history, locations, and testimonials, are all informed by research, community knowledge, and lived experience.

Each persona is a constructed narrative, a fictional individual holding emotional and experiential truth. Some originate in the pre-HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) years when survival meant waiting for medicine that didn't yet exist, others in Russia's 1990s epidemic, another from Ukraine's delayed treatment access, two from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and several intersect with Australia's migration policies.

As an artist working with themes of witness, survival, and resilience, parafiction allows me to honour the truth of these experiences without appropriating individual real lives.

The testimonial voice

On the blockchain, each portrait carries a longer description written in the subject's voice. First person. This decision was deliberate.

Medical and historical language creates distance. Third-person narration positions the artist as authority over the subject. First-person testimonial centres the humanity and agency of the person living the experience, even when that person is a parafictional construction. It's also a choice that aligns with documentary and oral history traditions: the witness speaks. We listen.

Pre-HAART survivors

Roughly 30% of the collection represents pre-HAART survivors; people diagnosed before 1996 when effective treatment became available. These are the people who survived on hope, stubbornness, and luck. Who watched friends die while waiting for medicine that didn't yet exist.

Robert, diagnosed 1987. Trevor, 1988. Frank, 1988. Stephen, 1989. Meera, contracted HIV 1993-94 as a child in India, unaware. Ntwali, 1993 in Rwanda. Keza, 1994 during the genocide.

These survivors carry a particular kind of weight: survivor guilt, the knowledge that they're alive when so many others aren't.

Diversity matters

The collection also represents the breadth of HIV long-term survival: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people navigating racism and stigma in healthcare systems. Refugees fleeing genocide, war, and persecution. Trans people struggling for both HIV care and gender-affirming healthcare. Immigrants escaping countries where treatment didn't exist or stigma was lethal. Serodiscordant couples, straight and gay. People born with HIV. Heterosexual couples who live with HIV and people whose diagnoses reshaped their identities and life paths. HIV is not a single story. It never was.

Recognising HIV long-term survivors

HIV Long Term Survivors Awareness Day exists because real people living with HIV for decades are still here. Still showing up. Still carrying the weight of outliving a generation. They deserve recognition, not as heroes or inspiration, but as people who have survived and are surviving.

STORIES: Witness is my attempt to honour that. To sit with the complexity of survival. The grief that never ends, the resilience that looks nothing like triumph, the quiet determination to keep going.

Most of the time, as someone living with HIV and knowing many survivors, at times it was difficult to work on this collection. These portraits won't comfort you. They're not meant to.

Perhaps they'll make you pause.

Perhaps they'll make you ask: What does it mean to witness?

What was witnessed during this epidemic?

And what are we still witnessing?

Trevor - diagnosed 1986 and hid his own status at work for over a decade

Jill - diagnosed 1990 during a routine medical check

Wei - an international student from Taiwan diagnosed 2015

Michael - contracted HIV through a blood transfusion in 1984 when he was five years old

Andrea - diagnosed in 1995 before transitioning in 2003

João - diagnosed at 28 years old, in Dili early-2000s

Ben & Laura - diagnosed 2001 at 19 years old before meeting and marrying Laura in 2015

Martin - diagnosed in 1994 before medical transition for gay transmen was understood

Dr Chen - diagnosed in 1993 during her medical residency before specialising in infectious disease treating hundreds of people living with HIV

Aunty Janice - Wiradjuri woman diagnosed in 1993

Daniel - diagnosed in 1999 as a high school teacher, terrified students or parents would find out

Mai - diagnosed in 1996 while training to be a nurse

Stephen - diagnosed in 1989 while he was a touring musician playing pubs across Australia

Kila - born with HIV in 1997 in Port Moresby

Yuri - diagnosed in 2000 at 25 years old during Ukraine's epidemic peak

Sarah - diagnosed in 2000 at age 22 after a relationship breakup

Makoto - diagnosed in mid-1990s in Tokyo

Oksana - contracted HIV at 15 years old in Moscow during Russia's HIV epidemic in 1998

Frank - diagnosed in 1988, lost his partner to AIDS five years later

Meera - contracted HIV in 1993-94 after an arranged marriage in rural India as a child

Ntwali - contracted HIV in 1993 at 24 years in Rwanda

Keza - contracted HIV during the 1994 Rwandan genocide at age 12

Helen - diagnosed in 2000 in her early 30s after an overseas business trip

Robert - diagnosed in 1987, when a positive result felt like a death sentence

24 pieces. Minted on objkt.com.

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Sunday 26 April 2026

TLDR

32 hand-painted abstract maps paired with haiku, each one a coordinate for a crossing we all navigate

32 parafictional speakers shaped by research, community knowledge, and lived experience, who have inhabited my studio for over a year

The first of two companion collections: Transitions follows in July 2026 with the same 32 voices speaking at greater length.

Thresholds is the fourth collection in the 2026 STORIES series: 32 hand-painted abstract maps, each paired with a haiku, each one a coordinate for a crossing we all navigate.

Maps impose order on complexity. They flatten the sphere, force the messy world into grids and projections, assign everything a category and colour code. They promise certainty, coordinates, the comfort of knowing where you are. For many of us, the territory remains uncharted. Gender, vocation, belief, immigration status, any passage where the internal contradicts the external. This collection is built for those crossings. It reminds us the official legend doesn't always match the journey, and that the experience of passage itself may become the only reliable evidence of transit.

Thirty-two parafictional speakers move through the collection: Shane, Mason, Jamie, Alex, Casey, Amara, Sam, Morgan, Kai, Riley, Jesse, Nikolai, Hayden, Priya, Cameron, Reese, Devon, Weilong, Rowan, Lindsey, Erika, Peyton, Elliot, Kiara, Finley, Bindi, Keith, Jude, Dylan, Wesley, Harper, and Ramsay. These invented personas have inhabited my studio for over a year, shaped by research, community knowledge, and lived experience. Their voices speak to transitions of childhood, belief, gender, vocation, death, immigration, identity, and separation. Others reference partnership, aging, and loss. Some describe bodies that exist beyond categorical systems, coordinates that don't resolve to any projection. Others recall deprecated maps they navigated by, routes that medical records don't document, passages where the legend simply stops.

Each voice is paired with a haiku: seventeen syllables holding the essential gesture of a crossing. Shane's haiku sits near the beginning: "Borders converge here. / Ground trembles beneath our feet. / We gather, then cross." The five territories: Approaches, Crossings, Ley Lines, Recollection, Dissolutions, are loose clusters rather than a prescribed path. Enter anywhere. Return often.

Where Leo & Neil and Emily & Sarah follow specific relationships, and Behind Closed Doors revealed 35 separate lives, Thresholds moves beyond named individuals into a constellation of 32 different voices. Everyone mid-passage. No one arrived.

Thresholds is the first of two companion collections. Transitions follows in July 2026, pairing abstracted portraits with conversational fragments: the same 32 voices, speaking at greater length. Together they will form a shared representation of the transitional state of our lives. The compressed truth and the conversational unfolding.

32 pieces. Minted on objkt.com.

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Monday 30 March 2026

TLDR

33 hand-painted works following a lesbian couple through the quiet negotiations of a life built together: what they set aside, what compounds, and what never quite gets named

Anyone who has built a life with another person knows the version of themselves quietly retired in the process. Emily & Sarah bring that cost into sharp focus

The third collection in the 2026 STORIES series.

Emily & Sarah is the third collection in the 2026 STORIES series: 33 hand-painted works following a lesbian couple through the quiet negotiations of a life built together. Each piece is drawn and painted by hand in gouache on A5 cotton rag, then digitised and minted individually. Like Leo & Neil before it, this collection is not a love story. It is a belonging story. The difference matters.

Society does not ask openly what it costs to belong. It simply raises the price until you stop counting. Emily and Sarah are two women who have chosen each other, and in doing so have encountered the particular pressures that choice brings: the expectations of family, the compromises of visibility, the slow erosion of desire that conformity demands. This collection looks closely at what they quietly become in order to stay together, and what they set aside to stay accepted.

The cost of belonging is not unique to queer lives. Anyone who has built a life with another person knows the version of themselves that gets quietly retired in the process. What Emily and Sarah's story brings into focus is how that cost compounds: the preferences surrendered, the desires softened, the parts of self that become too complicated to maintain when belonging has a price. The 33 works trace that compounding across the full arc of their relationship, from early compromise through to the settled weight of what has been given up without ever quite being named.

Emily & Sarah sits in direct conversation with Leo & Neil: both collections ask what belonging inside a relationship costs, through different lives, different pressures, different erasures. Where Leo & Neil maps two men negotiating with each other and with everything they inherited, Emily & Sarah maps two women navigating a different set of expectations, a different erasure, the same fundamental question.

What do we surrender when we choose to be chosen? The collection asks that across 33 works and resists an easy answer.

33 pieces. Minted on objkt.com.

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Friday 27 February 2026

TLDR

35 hand-painted cubist house exteriors, each paired with a 30-word micro-story about what happens inside

The cubist form mirrors the concept: a single perspective fractured into multiple narratives of suburban normalcy

The second collection in the 2026 STORIES series

Behind Closed Doors is the second collection in the 2026 STORIES series: 35 hand-painted cubist house exteriors, each paired with a 30-word micro-story about what happens inside. The cubist form is deliberate. Just as cubism fractures a single perspective into multiple viewpoints, these stories fragment the assumed narratives of suburban normalcy. Every house looks ordinary from the outside. Nothing inside is. 

The collection grew from a straightforward observation: we live alongside people we fundamentally do not know. We wave cheerfully at neighbours whose lives we never see, walk past houses whose doors conceal realities we would never imagine from the footpath. Private life is not what the façade suggests. Behind Closed Doors asks what those realities actually look like, without flinching and without judgment.

The 35 stories explore a range of emotional tones. A family portrait taken the week before a diagnosis. A retired teacher navigating a medical cannabis prescription and a pension that doesn't stretch. A woman rehearsing explanations for bruises before waving cheerfully at her neighbour. A couple dancing without music, dementia taking the words and leaving the movement. Three generations kneading dough, the recipe never written down. The collection moves through these moments with deliberate emotional rhythm, breathing room between devastating pieces, connection arriving where it isn't expected.

The stories resist easy categorisation. Concealed grief and quiet rituals sit alongside mounting anxieties and unexpected tenderness. Joy and devastation sit alongside each other because that is how private life actually works. The houses we pass contain as much tenderness as violence, as much hope as despair. Behind every closed door lives a complete, complex human reality. This collection makes that visible.

As the second collection in the STORIES series, Behind Closed Doors moves outward from where Leo & Neil began. Where that collection looked inward at two people, this one looks across a street, a suburb, thirty-five separate lives.

35 pieces. Minted on objkt.com.

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Monday 12 January 2026

TLDR

30 hand-painted works following two men through the slow negotiations of a shared life: what they quietly become in order to stay together

As love succeeds, the collection traces the versions of self quietly retired, the identities performed, the ones grieved in private

The first collection in the 2026 STORIES series.

Leo & Neil is the first collection in the 2026 STORIES series: 30 hand-painted works following two men through the slow negotiations of a shared life. Each piece is drawn and painted by hand in gouache on A5 cotton rag, then digitised and minted individually. The scale is intimate. The subject is not.

Every relationship has an unspoken contract. Give this up, soften that edge, become easier to love. Leo & Neil are not exceptional in this: they are familiar, two people reshaping themselves to fit the space the other needs. What makes their story particular is the layering of negotiation that queer men carry into a relationship. They are not only negotiating with each other. They are negotiating with inherited shame, with the men they were told to become, with a version of themselves that had to be set aside long before they ever met. This collection looks closely at what two people quietly become in order to stay together.

This is not a collection about love failing. Love succeeds here. That is precisely the issue. The 30 works trace what that means: the versions of self quietly retired, the identities performed, the ones grieved in private. The collection stays close to the relationship rather than reaching for the universal. Leo and Neil are people navigating a specific life, and that specificity is where the truth lives.

Two works sit at the heart of the collection for me. Before, No. 24, is the moment the contract becomes visible: Leo and Neil look at old photos together, agree they looked so different, and neither mentions how their eyes held more light before. Dangerous Sunset, No. 30, is what follows: the two of them on the porch, wondering what they lost becoming ‘us’, neither asking. Some questions feel too dangerous.

Leo & Neil launched the STORIES series because this question felt like the right place to begin. It sits in direct conversation with the third collection, Emily & Sarah: both ask what belonging inside a relationship costs, through different lives, different pressures, different erasures.

30 pieces. Minted on objkt.com.

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Monday 1 December 2025

TLDR

30 abstract works made for World AIDS Day 2025, using clashing Rothko-inspired colour fields to make visible the biological assault that continues beneath pharmaceutical control

Structured across five thematic series, these works challenge the reality beneath the medical success story

Drawn from my lived HIV advocacy experience, this collection maps the contemporary lived reality of HIV within a perpetual viraemic siege.

Virologic Assault is a collection of 30 abstract works made for World AIDS Day 2025. I created them using Holbein acrylic gouache and black pen, working in the tradition of Rothko's colour field practice: large areas of clashing, unresolved colour doing the work that representation can't.

The public story of HIV in 2025 is one of medical success, with a comfortable narrative that pharmaceuticals have made HIV a non-issue. As an artist living with HIV, this collection speaks to a reality that story leaves out. The viral assault beneath the medical success story. Living under siege. Every day. An undetectable viral load does not mean the body is at peace. The cellular warfare continues beneath it. This collection is an attempt to make that ongoing assault visible through colour, form, and abstraction.

The 30 works are structured across five thematic series. Invisible Burden maps the daily ritual of pharmaceutical survival. Somatic Recall explores how the body holds the memory of viral invasion long after viral loads drop. Chronicity sits with the psychological weight of forever: lifetime pharmaceutical dependence rendered in colour field and geometric repetition. Liminal inhabits the unstable threshold between sick and well that contemporary HIV occupies. Chronic Reconciliation closes the collection with what I'd describe as hard-won coherence rather than peace. Virologic Assault occupies a nuanced ground of contemporary chronic illness: the ongoing biological negotiation, cellular adaptation, and unexpected beauty found within a perpetual viraemic siege.

One thread running through the collection that felt significant to me is inflamaging: the intersection of HIV-related inflammation and the ageing process. More than half of people living with HIV are now over fifty. The medical challenge of distinguishing HIV-related inflammation from natural ageing is genuinely contemporary, unresolved, and almost never part of the public conversation about HIV.

I bring over 10 years lived experience in HIV advocacy to this collection, approaching a subject the art world still tends to approach from the outside. I hope this collection offers something to people living with HIV who recognise the gap between the medical narrative and their own daily experience. For everyone else, I hope it opens a window into a reality that is all too easy to overlook.

30 pieces. Minted on objkt.com. Launched World AIDS Day, December 1, 2025.

After viewing the collection, I'd love to hear your thoughts! ⚡6 quick short 🔒ANONYMOUS questions

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Sunday 21 September 2025

TLDR

Death is persistent infrastructure transmitting after the host goes offline

26 hand-painted Rothko-inspired works map 13 death transmissions across dual protocols

The exhibition invites you to navigate the network as a Necronaut

Death in Western culture is treated as a system shutdown. This collection proposes a different kind of boot sequence entirely. Terminal Networks began with two ideas arriving together. The first: death as infrastructure, an active, persistent system where signal keeps transmitting long after the host goes offline. The second: that the moment the human spirit leaves the body, something switches on rather than off. A plugging in. A coming online into a matrix of energy running through everything, the way the internet seems to be reaching into every corner of human activity.

The 26 hand-painted watercolours in this collection were conceived and built in 2025, drawing on cybernetic death theory and Rothko's transcendent colour field practice. Working with gouache on cotton rag paper, I used colour and sensation so the pigment carried the conceptual weight. Every piece was painted by hand, scanned at 600dpi, and minted individually on the blockchain. Human bodies are notoriously unencrypted: vulnerable, permeable, open to remote access. The minting process felt like an extension of that idea.

The structure is deliberate. Thirteen terminals, each a visual station mapping a distinct flavour of death: violent, entropic, digital, ecstatic, forgotten, divine, entombed, null, viral. Each terminal splits into two protocols, a Primary transmission and an Echo. The Echo is a glitch, the system's response to its own signal, never quite resolving. Infrastructure terminals reveal absence as architecture, possession as protocol.

Two works sit with me particularly. Node 09A\ Possession Protocol maps the idea that spirits use living bodies the way we use devices, borrowing bandwidth, routing signal through available hardware, death as interface rather than departure. Node 03A\ Navigator Online explores the moment of submission to the network of the dead, the crossing point where the living signal hands itself over. The dead are not behind. They are parallel.

Terminal Networks positions you, the viewer, as a Necronaut; navigating this network, tracing transmissions, following signal across 26 nodes of pigment and colour. The recursive pull is intentional. The system is still running. The network is still live. The signal stays open.

26 pieces. Minted on objkt.com.

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Monday 21 July 2025

TLDR

20 hand-painted works built from a single photograph of my father

A three-act descent into the silence between father and child

What do we inherit from our fathers? What is chosen? What is inevitable? The collection descends into these questions.

Legacy of Silence is a collection of 20 hand-painted works built from a single source: a photograph of my father. Every piece begins from the same hand-drawn abstract outline of that figure, seated confidently, at ease. From there, each work departs differently. Some stay close to the original. Others dissolve into angular colour and suggestion, the familiar outline barely legible beneath the pigment. The repetition is deliberate. The same man, seen again and again, never quite the same twice.

The collection maps the relationship between father and child across three acts: The Heavy Beginning, The Cracks and Longing, and The Struggle for Sovereignty. These aren't dramatic categories. They describe something quieter and more ordinary: the world a father builds, the slow recognition of its limits, and the longer work of becoming someone beyond those limits.

My father was a missionary, a disciplinarian, a dreamer. Armoured and righteous, but also wounded in ways he could never quite articulate. Not all fathers teach with words. Silence was his primary language, and silence shaped everything. Works like The Grief He Could Not Name and Hymns for a Shattered Voice sit at the centre of what that cost; not accusation, just witness. The Child Behind the Iron Door and A Hunger Older Than Language map what grew in the space his silence created.

The final act moves toward sovereignty rather than resolution. The Road Paved in Forgiveness Unasked and Inheritance of the Unspoken Crown close the collection without tying anything off neatly. What do we inherit from our fathers? What is chosen? What is inevitable? What do we redeem and what do we leave behind?

What surprises people most, I think, is the colour. These are bright, vibrant works. The palette refuses the grey weight of the subject, and I think that's right. A life shaped by silence still breathes colour.

20 pieces. Minted on objkt.com.

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Wednesday 2 April 2025

TLDR

33 hand-painted works inspired by medieval woodcuts, exploring the occult as a long-standing sanctuary for the dispossessed, the disabled, and the disfranchised

The Little Witch moves through the collection gathering with entities older than memory in spaces the mainstream refuses to occupy

Grounded in personal experience and occult history, these works propose that belonging has always been found in the places that society's closed doors never reach

Invoking Belial is a collection of 33 hand-painted works inspired by the visual language of medieval woodcuts: dense, symbolic, morally complex. Working in gouache on cotton rag, I set out to make the ephemeral visible: to explore something I've long believed: that the occult has always welcomed those the mainstream turns away. The dispossessed, the disabled, the disfranchised. The ones society has no comfortable category for. This collection is built on that history.

A recurring figure moves through the collection: the Little Witch is the thread connecting the works, appearing in ritual gatherings, in astral flight, in direct encounter with entities older than memory. In Who and Church, the cast-aside gather alongside devil-like figures to dance and socialise; belonging rendered as ritual, community found in the spaces the respectable world refuses to occupy.

The collection draws equally on personal experience and on the long tradition of the occult as sanctuary. I wanted to make visible what that sanctuary actually looks like: not horror, not fantasy, but a genuine alternative to the mainstream's closed doors. Demons, in this collection, don't wait for an invitation. They find a Side Door. And sometimes, as in Between Us, two figures simply step toward each other. No salt lines, no spiritual combat: what others might call possession, I call presence.

Red Gate sits at the collection's most confronting edge. Drawing from Hans von Gersdorff's historical wound-man woodcut, it reimagines the Prince of Torment as a figure whose wounds are maps of entry rather than damage: desire as will, the gate opening in recognition rather than by force. Seen takes a different turn entirely, grounded in something that actually happened: on Eddy Avenue in Sydney in May 2015, I watched a Transit Thing stumble across three lanes of peak hour traffic and disappear into thin air.

Each of the 33 pieces is a portal and a witness. I hope viewers come away with a different sense of what the occult holds and who has always found shelter there. Collect evidence that other worlds have never been silent.

33 pieces. (Not yet) Minted on objkt.com.

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