My practice is interdisciplinary and generative in results often with intimate sculptures and object installations. I am interested in objects that synergise intimacies with the body and yearn for completeness within absents and separation. I am motivated by the differences within my practice and how works can become questioned and altered by engagement and evoking exploratory understandings.

My research unfolds metaphysical values that converge ideas around the intent of magic on material thinking and speculative folklore. This is a continual investment of interest and development. These values are exposed, compressed and fabulised within working methodologies that collectively pull together transitionary states, and confessions of experience.




Sunday 26 February 2017

Collisions in silence: breaking habits through making


 

I have cultivated a practice that survives by direction best described as Artist as Collector. My inventory of found objects amass no limitations or hierarchies and grow with nuance’s that most of the time go unnoticed. The physical act of finding has an important marriage to realisations of circumstances. This is shown and effected by me as the finder and the complexities of being human in the mundanity of living manifesting in results of acquisitions, jewelled with geography; where I am at a given moment and what is the offering to harvest.

The stuff I collect comes from many evolved sources, some are free and been crowned as junk or something lost, abandoned or left behind (think of the glut of broken umbrellas with a stern wind). Some are acquired by paying for them, favourite haunts are car-boot sales and second hand shops. This has been inbuilt into my behaviour since being a child, being given a few coins to hunt out my chosen finds at low financial cost. I have even been a speaker and independently published zines for hints and tips of making the most out of finding at these opportunities. I relish the rush of looking to find something often I never knew I needed, I live and feed this compulsion as a means to make my work.

Having stuff as ingredients and materials to work with is a habit to which has formed over the years. I think each readymade is enchanted with its own charge through unique memories that overpower the realisation of the object and its visual reading. This can obviously change simply by something as slight as changing the context to which an existing object is viewed. A myriad of systems and a margin-less ethos to making, results with my finds becoming something other than a prophesy as a sum mirrored by each items provenance. A new language is created through a conglomerate of ideas and working methodologies given rest bite through a constant making or remaking. Gemstones get glued to cardboard then folded and hammered, signed photographs reduced to confetti and contained, plastic flowers taken out of graveyard bins are fabricated with heirlooms dipped in paint. My work long ditched gravities to make things that are instantly attractive by means of conventional decorative or ornamental viewpoints. This becomes humorous if you think of majority of the original states of the objects I alter are knick-knacks or souvenirs bearing witness to events, or simulating prescribed visual niceness to put on display.

I see my work as an anthology of objects echoing notions of still lives and self-portraits in isolated artefacts that awaken miscellaneous withdrawals. Recovering something familiar that adopts an attitude to yearnings of incompletion and intimacy of touch is an absence I abruptly leave in my work, for space for personal prediction to fill.

 



 

Moons, Masks


Moons

Masks

Paper, aluminium, shoe laces

2016-17

 

That feeling when you need to stop ignoring something, confront it, and let it go. To translate crudely Kill it to change its current form. I started with the physicality of using my body and having a death mask taken. The endurance of this procedure seemed to fit more than initially planned. The time under the cast, in the cold, the dark and the silence with myself gave me the opportunity to re-prepare for welcoming the light (having the cast removed). This was a considered preparation and the death mask itself a totem of a remedy distilled in a moment of my own face. Importance now lied in what do I do with its potency of the object? Dilute it!

I took casts of the cast each taking part of the rooted purpose with it. An involvement of making that made my hands draw the contours and voids of my face over and over again to reveal a new offering of a simple mask that will restrict the living acts of the face if worn.   

In plain sight I couldn’t recognise myself, I saw my deceased Farther. Something distant that sits in my blood has been surfaced in this work.