Palmer’s New Zealand is iconic, yet intimate. His paintings explore the role desire and intimacy play in the development of memory and recall of personal history. Memories of his past are reshaped and retold from a sense of developed personal mythology and the experience of his present circumstance: an expat New Zealander, living in Australia. This nostalgic distance, is an area of particular interest and tension in Palmers recent work – reconciling the land of his childhood with his experience of it today.

A background in filmmaking informs Palmer’s painting practice. His compositions are cinematic and place emphasis on native, while his energetic brush work plays in the space between the painterly and photographic. His highly personalised landscapes, capture a moment in time, where light and spatial arrangement work together – tapping into something distinctly New Zealand, yet strangely universal. Through roads, dilapidated buildings, fence posts and other civilizing signs are playfully set against the vibrancy and rawness of the natural landscape, perhaps exposing both the tension and congruity of our relationship with the land.