INHERITANCE explores the nature and nurture of lineage, embodied landscape and epigenetic memory. It is shaped by ideas of and around my particularly complicated familial past in Australia. Strands of DNA are set against vines of entanglement, intense colouring snakes around umbilical cords, and storytelling folds in on distinctions between design and imagery. All the while, overlaid backgrounds conceal and reveal the layers of making. Surfaces are left bare or sanded back. Openings become portals to other places and patterning is held in the rhythm of its own detail.

The series started with this little painting, Left and Righteous. Contours are borrowed from a previous painting to shape the ground, so its beginning is partly a continuum. The arrows point directions from and towards. Left as in past and abandoned. Right as in correct and rightful. Ahead being a head, being the gable headdress of the 16th century English court: an identity imposed upon Catalina de Aragón who became Katharine Queen of England.

The patterning recalls camouflaging from an idealistic landscape of the aristocracy, uninterrupted by development. Where a design of war becomes the art of Warhol – supposedly connected with the all-encompassing tranquillity of Monet waterlilies – becomes a design of fashion.