Aurelia

Aurelia

Yorke Peninsula, South Australia

"Where nature creates its own palette."

Aurelia is a painted interpretation of one of my earlier photographic works, Luminous, captured across the salt lakes of South Australia's Yorke Peninsula.

What first drew me to this landscape was the extraordinary natural variation in colour across the lake — shifting from intense, almost red-orange tones through vibrant orange and into the softest dusty pinks.

These colours weren't created or enhanced to produce a particular effect. They were naturally occurring within the salt lake, shaped by the unique combination of water, salt, minerals and environmental conditions.

In translating the photograph into paint, I wanted to capture that incredible transition while moving away from the precision of photography. Layers of acrylic and expressive palette-knife marks allow the colours to merge, break apart and build across the surface, creating a more tactile interpretation of the landscape.

For me, Aurelia isn't a recreation of Luminous, but a reinterpretation of something I experienced in the landscape — taking an extraordinary natural phenomenon and exploring it through colour, texture and paint.

It's another part of the evolving relationship between my photography and painting, and a reminder that nature can create some of the most extraordinary palettes of all.

Original acrylic painting