I make sculptural works and images from found objects and materials, placing things in relation to see where they ‘fit’ together, mirror each other or provide compliment or contrast. Through photography, word-play and installation I attempt to capture the way things interact with the environments they find themselves in, making connections between texts that I am reading and images that resonate from my photographic and video archive. Working ‘in the moment’ I use studio shadows and instant filters (on instagram and iMovie) to capture drama or emotion, later developed in various Adobe packages.
My interest in relationships (both within the self (selves) and between each ‘other’) originates in a study of Archaeology and the development of human consciousness - how we came to perceive ourselves as differentiated individuals in an interconnected world. In my current body of work (Domestic Structures) what start out as a individual sculptural works interacting with their environments soon become a collection of images, each photographic or video frame uniquely identifying an object-environment relationship from an ‘other’. These self-portraits, in which the self is imagined as entangled within the enviornment it creates, provide the means through which one ‘image’ can relate to an other ’s image. In so doing the portrait series reveals new relationships, between one image and an 'other', ideas for exhibition installations in which individual sculptures are brought together in shared environments, ‘social’ situations over which their individual portraits cast a critical gaze.
The Domestic Structures series relates to its own particular time and place. During the early days of COVID I started to work with household recycling in my kitchen-studio making small sculptures from paper egg-cartons and collages from newspapers and magazines. Working with whatever was to hand these often combined home wool crafts such as French knitting and weaving. The scaled-down studio meant that I worked on small pieces that were realised quickly and produced in quantity, helping me more easily see the patterns that were emerging. As a result I have a greater insight into my practice and an archive of forms to take back into the studio.
I am excited for 2021 and the opportunity to be back in the studio to develop some of these forms, making my own paper pulp assemblages at large scale. A 1:12 scaled exhibition at ‘Shelter in Place Gallery’ in Boston in March is giving me an opportunity visualise these small ‘domestic structures’ on a bodily scale as I prepare larger works for a new full-sized installation - a shrine to the goddess Athena - at ‘The Shed Space’ in Baltimore in June.
