The scene is 3am in his garage, a threshold space between night and morning. Surfboards line the walls in deliberate arrangement. His two cats bear witness. Half finished projects accumulate around him, a loose and uncontainable archive of memory. Born in Western Australia, grandson of an artist, McTaggart’s practice is guided less by formal discipline than by instinct. A professional surfer and musician, he approaches painting as necessity rather than career. The work is not constructed but extracted, drawn from moments, encounters, and the residue of lived experience.
High End Memory occupies the interval between recollection and invention. These are fragments, half formed, overexposed, softened at the edges. Faces drift in and out of focus, not portraits but impressions. Someone once known. Someone almost recognised. Someone entirely fabricated. Memory, after all, performs an edit. It is selective, embellished, and unreliable. Colours intensify. Details dissolve. What persists is not objective truth but affective residue. McTaggart’s paintings embrace this tension, refusing resolution in favour of a productive blur.
His methodology owes nothing to institutional training. It emerges from quiet geography, intermittent swells, and the gift of a paint box. It comes from music made without commercial ambition, collaborative and incidental and pure. Painting becomes a form of problem solving: a gesture applied, disrupted, and recovered. Mistakes are not failures but generative events. McTaggart approaches the canvas with the same unschooled rigour he brings to a wave or a chord. The studio is a garage. The practice remains unburdened by precedent.