The Studio

These paintings, gathered here in my studio, trace different stages of perception, grief, adaptation, and imagination through my experience of progressive vision loss.

Some were created before my diagnosis. Others emerged during the transition into blindness.

Together they form another language alongside Blindfulness, a visual reflection on memory, identity, atmosphere, and learning to experience the world differently.

Oil painting of a mountain landscape at dawn, with warm orange light illuminating the ridges above layers of mist-covered hills and valleys. Dark silhouetted foliage frames the foreground beneath a wide pale blue sky.

Kahuranaki

Every morning, before the world fully wakes, Mt Kahuranaki emerges through the winter mist.
This painting was created before my diagnosis, at a time when life still carried an unspoken sense of continuity and certainty. I painted the quiet light across the ridges, the cloud resting low in the valleys, and the deep stillness before dawn fully breaks.

Over time, the painting has become less about landscape and more about presence, memory, and connection to place. The mountain remains a constant companion through change, loss, uncertainty, and adaptation.

Dawn is still my favourite time of day. There is something about the silence, the cold air, and the slow arrival of morning that continues to invite reflection and stillness.

A dramatic aerial-style landscape painting of rolling green hills with winding ridgelines and deep shadows, leading toward distant mountains under a pale blue sky. The terrain appears sculpted and flowing, with scattered clusters of trees adding scale and contrast to the vast, undulating landscape.

Mt Erin

Painted from the slopes of Te Mata Peak looking toward Mt Erin, this landscape holds a special place for Shelley and became one of her favourite works.

What drew me was the way the land seemed to move like a living surface, folded, flowing, almost breathing. The hills felt less like geography and more like memory and emotion shaped by light and shadow.

Ink on canvas painting of rolling green hills and farmland in a stylised, flowing landscape. A red and white caravan sits among winding yellow paths, trees, rivers, and patchwork fields beneath a striped blue sky.

Kairakau

This painting was created as my vision first began to change.
I found myself moving away from realism and toward stronger outlines, simplified forms, and brighter, more saturated colours. The greens became more vivid, the yellows more intense, and the shapes more defined as I adapted to what I could perceive most clearly.

The flowing hills, winding paths, and stylised landscape became less about accuracy and more about feeling, memory, and movement. There is still a sense of playfulness in the work, but also the beginning of adaptation quietly emerging beneath the surface.

Ink on canvas artwork featuring rolling green hills beneath an orange sky, with a cyclist riding through a stylised countryside. A lighthouse, small houses, flowers, trees, a bird, and an airplane are woven into the layered landscape in a dreamlike, flowing composition.

The Long Way Home

As my vision continued to deteriorate, painting became a different kind of process. Precision was harder to hold onto, and the work became more instinctive, guided less by detail and more by shape, colour, and emotional atmosphere. The landscape began to bend and flow toward memory rather than strict representation.

The cyclist moving through the hills, the distant lighthouse, and the scattered houses all carry a quiet sense of longing. Looking back, there is a wistfulness and loneliness woven through the painting that feels clearer to me now.

Abstract mixed media painting with layered red, white, black, and earthy brown brushstrokes sweeping across the canvas. Fragmented textures, scratched surfaces, and energetic marks create a sense of motion, tension, and shifting forms within a chaotic, expressive composition.

Heavy Voodoo

This work emerged during a period when the reality of vision loss was becoming impossible to ignore. The painting carries a sense of turbulence and fragmentation, an attempt to express the emotional chaos that arrived as certainty and familiar ways of navigating the world began to unravel.

The layered marks, scraping textures, and shifting forms reflect an inner landscape that felt unstable and difficult to contain. At the time, painting became less about control or composition and more about release, a direct response to fear, confusion, anger, and disorientation.

Heavy Voodoo is raw and unsettled. Rather than trying to make sense of the experience, the painting allows the disorder itself to speak.

Mixed media abstract painting with sweeping black and white forms crossing a vivid red background. Textured layers of paint, gold detailing, and expressive brushstrokes create a dramatic, high-contrast composition filled with movement and tension.

M@cular Descent

As visual detail became less reliable, painting shifted away from representation and toward something more instinctive and immediate. Colour, movement, texture, and gesture began to carry more of the emotional weight.

M@cular Descent reflects both disruption and transformation. The work holds tension, movement, and fragmentation, but also a strange sense of release. It became less about trying to hold onto clarity and more about allowing another visual language to emerge.

Dark abstract mixed media painting with deep black and blue textures surrounding a luminous central form of layered white, silver, and icy blue patterns. Fluid organic shapes and glossy surfaces create a sense of depth, movement, and emergence from darkness.

Optical Coherence Tomography 2

This work was inspired by the surreal experience of watching my own vision break down over time through OCT scans. Sitting in darkened clinic rooms, looking at cross-sections of the retina on a screen, I became aware of seeing vision translated into data, fragments, textures, and strange shifting landscapes.

The painting draws from that unsettling overlap between the clinical and the deeply personal. The layered forms and luminous structures echo both microscopic imagery and inner terrain, parts of the eye appearing almost cosmic, fragile, and unknown.

Optical Coherence Tomography 2 is not an illustration of vision loss, but a response to the strange experience of witnessing perception itself changing from within.