I am a registered art therapist (AThR), art educator, doctoral researcher on art and education, and mindfulness teacher based in Sydney. My work sits between art, education, mindfulness, philosophy, and everyday life.

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For many years, I have been interested in a question that continues to shape both my research and teaching: why is it so difficult for people to live according to what genuinely matters to them, even when they understand themselves intellectually?

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This question led me toward art therapy, arts-based research, and children’s education. Through this work, I became increasingly interested in how values are formed through culture, family, education, memory, bodily habit, and social expectation. I see artmaking as important because it allows these forces to become material and visible, rather than remaining abstract ideas.

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My research explores how artmaking can help people work with value conflict, inherited expectations, and ways of living that no longer feel fully their own. I am especially interested in art as a form of inquiry: a way of thinking through image, symbol, material, gesture, and embodied experience.

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Alongside research, I teach children using approaches that integrate art, reflection, mindfulness, philosophy, and emotional inquiry. I am interested in helping children develop attentiveness to their own ways of experiencing, valuing, and relating to the world, especially within cultures increasingly shaped by performance, optimisation, and comparison.

Artonomy grew from these experiences. The name combines art and autonomy, reflecting an ongoing exploration of how art may help us participate more consciously in the process of becoming.