Rocks were an ever-present feature dominating the environments in which Poss grew up and discovered the world:

• from her earliest years living on 30 acres on the, then edge of St Ives, where their little cottage (still standing) was built from sandstone hewn by a Scottish stonemason from a quarry in the backblocks of the property;

• to Kuringai Chase where she would run with her siblings down to Bobbin Head after school each afternoon surrounded by the pink, white and orange of the Hawkesbury sandstone shelves and shale outcrops covered in lichen and surrounded by eucalypts;

• to living in the Thunderbolt country of New England where the renegade bushranger used the massive clusters of granite boulders to launch daring robberies of stagecoaches.

The sense of solidity, stability and gravitas of rocks; the feeling of non-judgemental companionship (they are always there) and the way in which rocks relate to each other and the space around them; the shapes, the texture, the colours.

Recent travels to the rocky, rugged Cornish coast in the English west country and the ancient Celtic megaliths of Eastern Portugal, have reignited Poss’s fond and nostalgic relationship with rocks. As she struggles to escape realism and embrace abstraction, rocks have helped her to see the beauty of the negative spaces, to use collage and other media to capture what she feels rather than just what she sees.

Despite having had no formal art training in her earlier years, Poss has become a dedicated art student benefiting from mentors such as Libby Wakefield and Paul Macklin through structured tuition and many experiential workshops. She paints every day, has a prodigious output across many genres and has been hung in multiple group and solo exhibitions at BDAS, the SHAC, the King’s School and the Southern Highlands Arts Trail.