Throughout my life I have felt a close affinity with the mythologies of China, Scandinavia and Scotland for their magical escapism and folklore teachings. Myth is a body of work born from my curiosity about and connection with the different myths of these ancient cultures. During times of turmoil or moments of adversity I have always felt the comfort of mythology. It provides a retreat in its whimsical and at times brutal legends from the ages. Using traditional hand-building techniques, my work explores the hardships, boundaries and restrictions that arise when creating such minute details in such a precarious medium.

Our consciousness is affected by the paradox that it can be both aware of self and dislocated from it when faced with the seemingly familiar. The intent in my body of work is to explore this paradox, inviting intimacy as the viewer follows the unsettling trajectory of an inner conflict. In representing consciousness (and lack thereof) as a fog - a 'plaguing' force - I intensify its ephemeral yet potent nature; it intrudes and can either prove to be a beauty or a hindrance, much like the essence of human thought.

Audible social chatter, tweeting birds, laughing children, honking traffic, pouring rain: we are subconsciously guided by the sounds that surround us. My body of work expresses my experiences with hearing loss within the context of constantly advancing technology. The idiosyncratic juxtaposition of vivid hues and monochromatic images represents both my inner conflict and my resolve in confronting my adversity. Amalgamated into a singular immersive experience, the auditory and visual components of my work are intended to engage the postmodern audience in a soundcheck of my subdued world and encourage them to reflect on the significance of their own hearing.

Responding to my first-hand experience of the devastation caused by the Black Summer bushfires, and the subsequent regeneration of Australia's south-east coast, my body of work represents the often overlooked, but magical, qualities of our endangered native flora and fauna. Using clay, a material inherently bound to the environment, I hand-built five forms that express aspects of various endangered species. My intent is for audiences to view these animals and plants in a new light, to inspire a sense of awe that results in action to protect our treasured Australian native flora and fauna from extinction.

My body of work explores human experience through abstraction rather than reality. My application of mediums expresses our inner emotions and the intricacies of everyday life. Pushing the boundaries of my own expectations I developed a passion for different mediums and their application. There is a complex balance in the rhythmic arrangement of forms achieved by organic shapes and strokes. My experimentation with the colour palette throughout the work represents the ebb and flow of my Year 12: its highs and lows, excitement and disappointment. Texture adds an extra element and contrast in the juxtaposition of flat lines and vectors.

Memory is something we should be intrinsically grateful for, yet ironically it is often consigned to oblivion until you observe its deterioration first-hand. It was this concept that guided me towards the formulation of my body of work, concocting a visual representation of the indescribable and seemingly unimaginable experience of unwillingly surrendering to a 'fog' that glazes your eyes and clouds your memory. By embracing abstraction's departure from accurate expression, my intent is to implore the viewer to contemplate whether memory truly erases, or is it rather submerged, deeply, within the fragmentation and dilution of the mind's landscape?

Memories occur in abundance in intimacy, yet within the labyrinth of our minds the broader image seems to fade away. My body of work represents the landscape of my mind; how my attachment to my grandparents' home and my Japanese culture is slowly dissipating as I gain distance, both physically and temporally. It appears only the small, specific objects that I gained attachment to in my youth maintain their clarity, yet how much more distance can these memories withstand?

"What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it." Salvador Dali

In my body of work I pay homage to the Surrealists and explore the perplexing beauty between reality and the uncanny. My intent was to emphasise the interrelationship between identity and culture. Each vessel that holds flowers represents an epoch -traditional, modern and postmodern - and cultural variations of flower arrangement express a universal harmony of nature and humankind. In our culturally saturated world, overwhelmed by the accessibility of information, we have become desensitised to reality and are trapped within our inability to find a 'stable' identity.

My body of work pays homage to the pain of migration: a deeply personal experience shared by my mother. Moving from Japan to Australia, she was constantly met with cultural and linguistic barriers and a relentless sense of displacement. My work uses plate prints, relief rolls and monoprint processes, layers of colours and images expressing incongruity, intended as an erratic oscillation between emotions of fear, acceptance, despair and grief. Layers of Japanese traditional Noh theatre transcripts represent the nexus between my mother's homeland and the performativity of the diasporic experience; acculturation can be likened to the 'performance' of Western traditions.

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Lewis Carroll. My body of work represents the ideas of loneliness, confinement and isolation within a space of safety. Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat is both a guiding figure and a threat, expressing the darker thoughts within our imagination, especially during night-time hours when our imaginations are free to 'run wild'.

My body of work uses the nostalgia for different generations of houses as a foundation to represent the history of Australian suburbia. This work was inspired when I uncovered the history behind my grandparents' house on Sydney's Northern Beaches, learning how the area went through extreme transformations from paddocks for cattle and other livestock to a maze of houses. My intent in Little Boxes on the Hillside ... was to prompt viewers to question their perception of Australian suburbia.