These pictures can be split into two groups; north and south - those I painted in Northland before moving south to take up the William Hodges Fellowship in Invercargill, and those I have painted since. Let them be seen as paintings, pictures, responses to environment.

In the past I have explored various conceptual themes in paint. History and land occupation (Blacklight, 1992), death and regeneration (GW series, 1994), memory and light as definers of space (Northland Paintings, 1999-2000). Recently I've grown bored with intellectual approaches to life and art. I want my paintings to return to their roots, to a more immediate, physical response.

Maybe it’s the bigness of the land I travelled through and the contrasting geology of the deep south and my distant Northland home that has intensified my intolerance of heavy European academicism in art. In his book Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino writes about writing, but his observations could as well apply to painting or any other art practice. "Soon I became aware that between the facts of life that should have been my raw materials and the quick light touch I wanted for my writing, there was a gulf that cost me increasing effort to cross. Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world - qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them."

- Laurence Berry, Artist statement, 2002.