Inspired by wildflowers, I produce linocuts that are a tribute to all women who manage to hold on to their essential feminine qualities of caring, creativity, nurturing, joy and ecstasy while they also continue to devise some means of protecting themselves against an environment that is often harsh and hostile. My wildflowers are a celebration of the feminine.

As a young girl growing up in Western Australia I remember the trips to the hills around Perth to see the wildflowers. Beautiful jewels of colour that displayed their beauty from harsh prickly and misshapen bushes. The smell, the lusciousness, the abundance was a joy to me then and still is today. As in everything in nature, one needed time and patience to experience and enjoy their offerings.

I've travelled much of the northwest of Western Australia and particularly love the Pilbara region. I really enjoyed visits to many pastoral stations and mining communities. The northwest is a vast and majestic country where one soon realizes the insignificance of the individual. It's also a very masculine environment and I can't help seeing the similarities between the wildflowers and the bush woman.

By late twenties I had studied music, worked on stations, cooked on bus trips around Australia and had many adventures before a year of teaching.

As a young mother, with four wonderful young, energetic, close-together children, I had become very ill and exhausted. Nothing was replenishing me. At this time I read a book by Joan Campbell (the successful Western Australian potter). In this book, Joan described how she made a major discovery - the deep urge to be creative. I empathised totally with her story and realised that was exactly what I needed to do for myself.

I also attended a powerful and uplifting seminar which reinforced the feeling that I wanted to be an artist. I made a deep commitment to follow my heart's dream - to push away all the inhibitions that my lifestyle perpetuated. I just had to move on and follow my deep intuition - to be creative and to be an artist I was prepared to express myself and to be judged on my work.

My strong urge was to do linocut and although I had been good at drawing when I was at school, I had no formal training. With the help and mentorship of Ron Gomboc, Garry Zeck and Philip Cook I went on to produce work for my first show at Gomboc Gallery, in 1990. This was followed by a solo exhibition at Holdsworth Gallery in Sydney in 1996. Later exhibitions followed at Charles Hewitt Gallery in Woollahra.

Words by Jan Phillips with Jude Taylor

25 November to 1 December 2003