Biography
My practice evades the distinction between painting and sculpture to create work that shares interrelated processes and opposing forces. The spatial existence of the work is dependant on my findings resulting in two, two and a half and three dimensions. Materials become attached, separated, dissected and reconfigured in order to reach an equilibrium. Working with typical art materials and domestic household textiles, my materials go on a journey of physical change to reach a point of no return. I provoke failure to occur by implementing destructive measures in order to learn, reveal, discover and unravel something new in a physical and psychological sense. A certain crisis, a sensation of release can be felt as my instinctive unconscious, direct engagement comes into play. I reveal fundamental unexpected results consisting of internal layers that would normally go unnoticed. Concerned with expression over representation I intend to make my actions count as I continually question the consequence of them. My work gets pushed to its limit, it doesn't settle and it is not considered finished until I discover a certain truth, the pulse of the work.
I work simultaneously in the round, having many pieces on the go at once. My painterly surfaces are constantly on the move as I rotate and flip them around the studio like an object. They continually travel back and forth from floor to wall as I examine and consider both sides of the surface. Oil, acrylic, pigment, and ink are diluted with turpentine, water or bleach resulting in a soft delicate palette that saturate quilts, wadding and mattress protectors as an attempt to filter paint through form. Once the work reaches a natural saturation point my excitement temporarily diminishes and so I allow time to pass in order to become detached from this intense activity. Paint dries as my materials become rigid, stagnant and crusty. Interested in an essential internal quality I take further action to re-energise through disorder. Fabrics are un-stitched and pulled apart as I reclaim the fruits of my labour.
The work raises questions about the physical value and material nature of materiality, and recently ones that we associate with the body that offer a sensual, secure, warm, comforting experience. I reflect on broader subjects including the boundary between internal and external space as I have notions about a hidden bodily strength and beauty that can only exist through it’s external flaws. I question why this is only discovered when faced with something of a destructive nature. These binary oppositions are the outcome of my work as I develop a practice that is in a constant state of flux, a continuous flow of creativity while uncertainty and indecision come into play. The works embody feelings of both separation and attachment, chaos and control and draw on life experience associated with the body, motherhood and psychoanalysis to charge their physical abstract forms.
