.I met Adrian when I was 18. It was the year 2000, and I’d imagined myself studying fine art in Melbourne … but life took a different turn, and I found myself at ADFA as an Army officer cadet, studying a double major in Literature -  the closest thing I could find to that creative pull.

Adrian taught me across three years, but it was his early lectures on WWI poetry that lingered. Something in them stayed with me - and over time, I’ve come to see how deeply his thinking about art and war has shaped my own practice.

We reconnected in 2021, whilst I was finally getting to study fine art in Melbourne. Adrian and his lovely wife Clare invited me to exhibit at the River of Art Festival in Moruya. In 2022, my daughter Imogen and I camped by the wild beach at Congo National Park, and I showed a series of counter-monument prints about the true cost of war.

It was there Adrian shared the story at the heart of this book — a story of love and loss, of a life in the military cut short.

That story resonated. My husband Andrew, who had also been Adrian’s student at ADFA, died in 2017.

So when Adrian asked me to illustrate these poems, I felt both honoured… and quietly overwhelmed. I wanted to do justice to such a powerful story, written with such care. What I first recognised as that familiar ADFA cadet tendency toward procrastination was, in truth, a kind of anxious resistance — a hesitancy to fully, emotionally enter the poems.

But slowly, by returning to the manuscript again and again, something shifted. I let go of trying to control the outcome, and, instead began to draw intuitively — allowing Adrian’s poetic images to surface, to drift, and to echo the emotional atmosphere of the writing, as well as my own inner feelings.

I worked in layers — ink, pencil, wax— building up and breaking down, redacting and reworking. It became a way of sitting with complex grief: textured, unstable, unresolved.

Motifs began to emerge. A spin-the-bottle game turning into a propeller — into the disorientation of grief. Jets softening into paper planes, carrying messages that circle, that falter, that don’t land as they should.

Another touchstone in Adrian’s poems was The Eagle pub in Cambridge, its ceiling covered in the names of WWII RAF airmen — scratched in or burned by hand, intimate and enduring. As an artist obsessed with counter-monuments, public art and quiet artistic acts of remembrance, the ceiling became a kind of visual anchor to the book. Its essence, like Adrian’s poetry, is profoundly human — a living monument to the missed and the missing.

The Eagle’s ceiling of smoky blacks, browns and ochres shaped my palette — evoking not only that space, but also wreckage, memory, distance, and the strange suspended feeling of loss.

My work often lives in that space — a desire to mark what is unsaid. Whilst official monuments can uphold myth, the work of veterans and their families and friends hold something more fragile, more complex, more true.

It feels especially meaningful, then, to launch this book at ANVAM — a place that holds these stories with such care. Thank you especially to Tanja and Mark Johnston, Kat Baldwin, Stevie Trembath and for supporting this event as part of FOVA.

Thank you to my dear and talented art school friends and collaborators:

Vani, whose photography and digital collages extended and transformed my drawings, carrying them through cascading, creative iterations that helped us tell Adrian’s story.

And Soile — currently in Finland, but no stranger to ANVAM — whose thoughtful and beautiful design brought the book into its final form.
Also, thank you to Shane from Recent Works Publishing for bringing this book into the world.

Thank you, dear Mark, for encouraging me to dedicate myself to a drawing practice.

And finally, Adrian — thank you. For your trust, your words, and for inviting me into this collaboration. It has been a deeply meaningful journey — professionally, creatively and personally.

Photos below are of the ANVAM opening in Melbourne by @lensoforion, thank you, Steve Cotterill