From Australia to the A.R. Mitchell Museum

Sometimes you enter an exhibition, send your artwork away and hope for the best.

And sometimes you decide that if your artwork is travelling all the way from Australia to Colorado… you might as well follow it.

Earlier this year, I entered two of my Western artworks into the Unbridled exhibition at the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art in Trinidad, Colorado.

Around 600 artworks were entered, and somehow, both of mine were selected.

So naturally, I decided I was going to Colorado.

The Story Started Long Before the Exhibition

What made seeing these pieces hanging in Colorado particularly special was knowing where they had started.

The artworks were inspired by experiences from my previous travels through the American West, including time spent on ranches in Utah and Arizona.

Those trips gave me access to real moments I could photograph, experience and eventually take home with me.

Months later, sitting back in my studio in Australia, those experiences became artwork.

Then the artwork made the journey back to America.

There's something I really love about that full circle.

I can travel somewhere, meet people and experience a completely different way of life… then bring a small part of it home, turn it into something through my own perspective and send it back into the place that originally inspired it.

Walking Into the Museum

I wasn't going to miss opening night.

Walking into the A.R. Mitchell Museum and seeing my two artworks hanging there was one of those moments that felt slightly surreal.

They weren't sitting on my drawing table anymore.

They were hanging in an American museum, surrounded by the work of an incredible group of artists.

And I was one of them.

Getting to meet so many of the other female artists whose work had been selected was probably one of my favourite parts of the evening.

There is something completely different about seeing artwork online compared with standing in front of it and then getting to meet the person who created it.

Every artist had brought her own experiences, style and interpretation of the West into that room.

To have travelled from Australia and be included amongst them was something I'll remember for a long time.

The People Behind the Artwork

These pieces also wouldn't exist without the people who allowed me into their world in the first place.

My time with Ranch From Wild Rose and at Painted Mesa Ranch gave me the opportunity to experience and photograph the moments that eventually inspired the work.

And then there were the people who helped me actually get to Colorado.

My friends Colleen and Tammy went to extraordinary lengths to support me and be there for the exhibition.

Artwork might have one person's name written at the bottom of it, but there are often a surprising number of people somewhere behind the story.

I'm incredibly grateful for mine.

A Long Way From My Studio

There was something pretty special about standing in Trinidad that night and thinking about the distance those pieces had travelled.

From experiences in the American West…

back across the Pacific to my studio in Australia…

and then all the way to the walls of the A.R. Mitchell Museum in Colorado.

That's a journey I never could have planned when I first took the photographs that inspired them.

And maybe that's what I love most about where my artwork is taking me at the moment.

I don't really know where the next experience will lead.

I just know I want to keep saying yes to the ones that feel interesting, keep creating from them and see where the artwork ends up next.

For now, though, having two pieces hanging in the A.R. Mitchell Museum is a pretty special chapter in that story.