Lighthouse Arts has invited a group of artists to reflect on what “home” means to them and create a work to be exhibited in the cottage beside the lighthouse on the Nobbys-Whibayganba headland, once the home to the site’s Lighthouse Keeper. I am trilled to be among those selected to exhibit.

I will be exhibiting a piece that is an amalgamation of maps, a cartographic interpretation of a conceptual ‘home’ from the perspective of someone perpetually displaced.

Being a full-time travelling artist without a home-base and with an admittedly peculiar sense of direction has led me to create some unconventional maps; remnants of the places I’ve been, places I’ve returned to and communities where I’ve momentarily found a sense of belonging.

These maps don’t strategically point to specific locations; they trace relationships, memories and the quiet tethering that happens when I revisit a place and its people. Some communities live-on only in my phone sustained by messaging apps and photographs long after I’ve departed… and sometimes, find my way back to a place where we carry on as though I had never left.

My connection to Awabakal Newcastle began decades ago, when I presented at the National Young Writers’ Festival as part of This is Not Art. In recent years, I returned as an Artist in Residence at The Lock-Up art space and developed an ongoing relationship with The Hunter Writer’s Centre and Lighthouse Arts which has become an annual pilgrimage, an opportunity for experimental making amid the unpredictable weather and isolated beauty of Whibayganba Nobby’s Headland and a chance to reconnect with a community of local Hunter makers and writers who so warmly and swiftly embraced me as one of their own.

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Exhibition Dates: 2 August – 20 September 2025
Opening event: Saturday 2 August 2025, 11 am – 1 pm

Lighthouse Arts
Nobbys-Whibayganba headland
41 Nobbys Rd,
Newcastle NSW 2300