Works

The Observer of National Science

Dr Alan Finkel AC · Chief Scientist of Australia
Scientist Series · Oil on canvas · 180 × 120 cm · 2025

The founding work of the Scientist Series. Finkel stands in the landscape of Australian science and energy, the domain of national science policy made visible. The focal zone centres on his face and hands, the collapsed reality. The land and sky around him stay a wave, carried as rings and spirals through the painting's periphery.

Acquired by the subject

Finkel Study

Dr Alan Finkel AC
Scientist Series · Oil on canvas · c. 80 × 60 cm · 2025

An intimate study with a darker palette and a harder ring treatment. The concentric wave structures dominate the space around the subject, foregrounding the uncollapsed state. Where the large portrait places Finkel in the world of national science, this one leaves only the observer and everything he has not yet looked at.

Acquired by the subject

The Observer of Dark Matter

Professor Elisabetta Barberio · Particle Physics, University of Melbourne
Scientist Series · Oil on canvas · 180 × 120 cm · 2026

Professor Elisabetta Barberio is a particle physicist at the University of Melbourne and the lead scientist of the SABRE experiment, a dark matter detection project using ultra pure sodium iodide crystals to search for the invisible matter that makes up most of the universe. She directs the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics, and the laboratory built for the experiment, a kilometre beneath rural Victoria, is the first underground physics laboratory in the Southern Hemisphere.

Barberio stands inside the SABRE dark matter experiment, a kilometre underground at the Stawell facility in Victoria, where the rock above shuts out the cosmic noise that would drown the signal she is listening for. She holds one of the ultra pure crystals built to catch particles no one has ever seen. The crystal in her hands is sharp and solid, the most resolved thing in the painting, an instrument designed to capture dark matter. The detector behind her dissolves into the wave state, rings and spirals carrying the invisible matter she leads the path to discovering, present all around her and seen nowhere.

Entered, Archibald Prize 2026

Available for institutional acquisition

The Observer of Cosmic Expansion

Professor Brian Schmidt AC · Nobel Laureate in Physics, Australian National University
Scientist Series · Oil on canvas · 180 × 120 cm · 2026

Schmidt is depicted within his observatory at Mount Stromlo, the site that helped detect the accelerating expansion of the universe. The observatory burned to the ground in the 2003 fires and he is still there, still working. Concentric rings and spiral structures fill the cosmological space around him, the expansion of everything rendered as a wave not yet resolved.

Entered, Lester Prize 2026

Available for institutional acquisition

Lizard Rock

Landscape Series
Oil on canvas · 150 × 120 cm · 2025

A resting place in the Australian bush. The rock collapses into the focal zone, sharp and warm, while the surrounding terrain dissolves into the wave state of the natural world, the light you see the whole scene by, held open at the edges.

Available

Red River Above the Blue

Landscape Series
Oil on canvas · 150 × 120 cm · 2025

A campfire in the Blue Mountains, looking out over the night and the Milky Way. The fire is the collapsed focal point, the thing you are looking at. The cosmos above dissolves into spiralling wave structures, the whole universe held as everything it could be, seen from a fire in the Australian dark.

Entered, Wynne Prize 2026

The Double Slit, Turned to Face You

Theory painting

The most reproduced diagram in physics, rotated to face the observer. Drawn from the side, the experiment is a diagram about light. Turned to face you, it becomes a description of looking: the beam travels toward your eye, and you stand where the detector stands. You are the measurement.

The Hidden Light

Theory painting

Three forms of light and their probability waves. Ordinary light travels in flat wavefronts and lands where you look. Twisting light spirals around its own dark core, carrying energy that never arrives at the centre of your gaze. Light that is there, and cannot be seen head on.