From Wildlife Hospital to Fine Art My Artist Journey
I didn't set out to become an artist — but I didn't exactly set out not to be one either. At 17, I was standing at that crossroads most of us know well: not quite sure what I wanted to do, but certain about what I loved. I'd always dreamed of working with animals as I grew up on a farm in New Zealand and a vet was the obvious answer — but maths and I were not friends, or chemistry. So when wildlife work and art both kept pulling at me, I followed them both.
While studying my Bachelor of Fine Arts, I was also working at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary on the Gold Coast — one of Australia's most beloved wildlife centres. I was working in the hospital at the time, which meant I saw the other side of wildlife: the animals brought in injured, tangled, and exhausted by the world humans had built around them. It was confronting, meaningful work.
What I didn't expect was that the two worlds would become completely inseparable.
The Fine Arts Degree That Changed Everything
My entire graduate exhibition was dedicated to the theme of human impact on wildlife — the thing I'd been living at Currumbin. I wanted people to somehow care about the animals I saw everyday and feel what I felt in that hospital. Not just see it, but feel it.
I developed four major works for my final year, and each one carried a message.
The first was the pelican — a close-up portrait painted with extraordinary detail, with a real fishing hook embedded through the canvas. It was created to invoke the raw emotion of what we witnessed daily in the hospital: the devastating impact of fishing line and hooks on seabirds. That piece still hangs in the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary hospital today.
The second was a snake, painted on newspaper. Newspaper was something we used constantly in the wildlife hospital at the time — hygienic, practical, easily replaced. But one day I looked down and noticed the headline beneath the animal: "Land for Sale." That became the piece. The snake lying across a property development advertisement was the subtlest message I could give about what's really happening to wildlife in Australia — their habitat, sold off piece by piece for development.
The third was a frog, caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. Frozen. That moment before impact that we all recognise. Cars, cats, and dogs were the three most common causes of injury we saw coming through the hospital doors, over and over again. This piece was about making that visible — putting the viewer in the position of the frog about to be squished.
The fourth and final piece was the largest — a two-and-a-half metre canvas, dominated by a single frog. Across its skin, colour shifted gradually, from purple to green. It was about climate change — not the dramatic, headline version, but the slow, quiet version that's harder to see and easier to ignore. Frogs are known as the canaries in the coal mine of the natural world. Their skin is so permeable, so sensitive to changes in temperature, moisture, and chemicals, that they register environmental shifts before almost any other creature. They are telling us something. The question is whether we're paying attention.
A Career Across Australia's Wild Places
After university, my career took me across some of Australia's most extraordinary environments. I spent time in the Top End of the Northern Territory working with crocodile management teams — getting up close with one of Australia's most iconic and misunderstood creatures. I worked along the Ningaloo Coast in Exmouth, surrounded by the extraordinary marine life of Western Australia. And I worked as a naturalist aboard the True North, an expedition vessel exploring some of the most remote coastlines in the country.
My drawings I make now are like field notes, from the feeling of being in the water with a manta ray or watching a crocodile hold completely still.
Still Living by This
The whole exhibition was built around a single idea that has guided my work ever since: that education is the first step to conservation. Every piece was designed to make people feel something — to close the distance between humans and wildlife, and to evoke caring for them.
"In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught." — Baba Dioum
My prints are my way of creating appreciation of the natural world.