This scene is morning light shining into a woodland clearing, beside a creek just beyond the right hand side. A tributary that flows into a larger body of water. This is cattle grazed native forest, half cleared by Scandinavian farming settlers. In the left of the clearing, a male peacock, sits on a supplejack vine in the shadows. An exotic foreign specimen, brought over here. In the burst of light is a vision of an European woman. I met her last year in St Mark's Square in Venice. But is she really here? Or, just a dream? A trick of my eyes, used to the dark shadows of the forest, blinking and squinting into the sun? Why is she in such a different place... and a world away? Or, is the dream hers? (She wears a bird mask after all.)

Once the characters start to tell their own stories, the play is then between the bird and the woman, in this strange new world. This is where the real work of the painting process started. To fine tune and balance the glow 'in or of her' with the light bouncing from the bright white of the bird.

In March 2011 I completed a residency at Kay Flavell's New Pacific Studio at Pukaha Mount Bruce. Mount Bruce is a national treasure for our native birds and recently they hatched the rare white Kiwi chicks there.

This work started with me imagining a settlers' dream. When northern european settler's arrived here, and were assigned farm blocks along the 70 mile bush. I explored and wondered what their lives may have been like. What new Northern Romantic narratives did these new settlers bring in their heads and their hearts to play out on this new stage. In their old boots, what visions would my mind have wandered to in those rugged hard days and years in a 'dark sea of strange forest'?