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.
