Why do I paint these motorbikes...

Because I had an idea and that idea was to paint a cultural icon of another country and because in my mind that would be a logical progression from painting lawnmowers, an Australian icon. So I went to Italy with Vespa motor scooters firmly in my sight. This would enable me to continue working with mechanical objects whose shapes and forms fascinate me. However things don’t always end up as you plan and I ended up in Slovenia drawing and photographing Tomos motorcycles from the 1970s. The act of riding scooters and motorcycles is much more widespread in many of the countries I visited than it is in Australia. It is a deeply engrained part of the culture. For many young people the first freedom of adulthood comes in the form of a scooter licence. In this world of bikes there are always hands. A motorbike needs a rider, a mechanic, as there is endless fixing up, hotting up and adjusting to make it go. These hands not only give life to an otherwise inanimate object they are always used to communicate passionately about them, European style.

Lea Ward

> view work from Lea's 2006 exhibition