If It Cant Be Measured It Cant Be Managed

Collage on wood panel
305mm x 305mm
2024
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With its sprawling density of signs and signals, If It Can’t Be Measured, It Can’t Be Managed riffs on the corporate obsession with metrics. The title becomes both a slogan and a warning: a world reduced to measurement is one in which value, meaning, and even intimacy are flattened into data points. The figure running through the work looks less like an athlete than a performer in a rigged race, forever chasing targets set by someone else.
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The collage reads as both critique and satire, exposing how management culture borrows the language of science and efficiency while peddling abstraction and control. In Paperpunk style, it remains playful even as it skewers its subject, a charged mix of neon gloss, fractured surfaces, and restless energy.
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This work was exhibited in CONTENT, a 2024 solo exhibition at Braemar Gallery in Springwood, New South Wales. Within that exhibition it sat alongside other explorations of media saturation, performance, and power, contributing a vivid take on the language of management and its grip on contemporary life.

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For the last 30 years I have been making physical, analogue, hand-cut collage art using only found materials.

That is an important distinction to make. When sourcing materials my work I do not use any form of reproduction, copying or digital manipulation in any way. All of the elements, all of the images that I use in my artworks, have been collected from the pages of magazines, books and comics, or from other printed materials like pamphlets, posters or flyers. A large part of the process of creating these pieces lies in the collection of the components. That is the thrill of the hunt; looking for the right pieces to fit together in order to create these compositions. Once found, the images are then hand cut from the page, most often with the use of scissors.

Once the materials have been collected and the collage has been constructed, my artwork then undergoes a process of varnishing, which not only give the collage a nice finish but also vastly improves the permanence of the item. All of the work that you see here has been treated with many layers of varnish and then buffed to a smooth finish. I often complete these artworks with a glossy top coat that gives each piece a shiny lustre that greatly enhances the vibrancy of the colours.

My studio is in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, on Dharug and Gundungurra country.