400 Seagulls

Four hundred seagulls. One for each year since Dutch navigator Frederick de Houtman made the first recorded European sighting of the Houtman Abrolhos Islands in 1619.

I painted them in the blues and turquoise of the Abrolhos, sky and sea flowing together, wind on the waves. Individual birds, each one distinct, yet forming something unified in their movement. Fleeting and enduring at once. The way history always is.

For seafarers across centuries, a seagull meant land was near. After weeks of open ocean, that first sighting carried everything, hope, relief, the vastness of what had just been crossed. I wanted that feeling inside the work. The quiet enormity of it.

400 Seagulls was included in Batavia Unravelled, an exhibition curated by Emma Clare Bussell at the Geraldton Regional Art Gallery, drawn exclusively from the City of Greater Geraldton's permanent art collection. To see this work placed within a broader curatorial narrative, alongside historically and culturally significant works held by the City, was deeply meaningful. These are the islands I grew up beside. This history belongs to the place that shaped me.

The work holds both the vastness of time and the intimacy of presence. An invitation to consider how stories, place and memory continue to ripple through the now.