STATEMENTS
History, Memory and Place
I create installations and painted works that observe and reflect the memory contained in a place. Not through drama or the memory of traumatic events but through a lens of nostalgia, displacement and loss.
I use whatever materials suit the project. I love working with salvaged or found materials for the narrative that they bring with them. Old windows are a favourite, I also have a collection of discarded dolls house furniture and dolls houses that make occasional appearances in installations along with digital video works and other sculptural forms to create environments that are inviting or intriguing and sometimes uncanny.
My paintings are oil paint on wood scavenged from building sites and tips, it pleases me to reuse materials and they add an element of chance, in size or form. My paintings start with a horizon line and develop as I move paint around the surface. I am taking a traditional genre like landscape and applying the themes of home and displacement and loss.
A GAME OF CONSEQUENCES 2015
I made this work while taking part in a collaborative project called 'Game of Consequences'. The project involved 20 artists who would respond to work handed to them by the artist before them in the chain... like the parlour game 'consequences' The game started with a 2m square canvas. There were no rules, only that we had to work in secrecy and that we worked for 10 days only on the 'work' but that we could make other works that were influenced by participation. What excited me most about the project was having no knowledge of what I would be starting with and the limited time-frame. When my time came to collect the artwork I was really surprised and a little disappointed that the work was still a canvas. I was prepared to receive a song, or a poem, or a jar of ashes but I did not expect the canvas. This video is what I made... and when it came time to pass the work to the next artist I passed along this film on a memory stick.
ECHO 2013
Statement
Not long ago I came across a photograph I had never seen before. It was a snapshot of my mother standing in the door of the houseboat home in which I spent my early childhood. The picture is extraordinary, not because of a superior quality of light, or composition or any technical aspect. It is extraordinary in that it is the first photograph I have ever seen of the house, just the house.
I have seen photographs from a distance in which the houseboat makes up a bit of the background. I have pored over them for hours attempting to tease from my memory the unseen details of architecture and details of the living that the building contained.
So this extraordinary photograph came like a gift. The gift it brought was a starting point for a body of writing about homes and how we dwell within them, and it was the starting point for a body of studio work that has brought me up to this point. It came as a complete surprise to me that the one rather faded and blown out picture of sunshine on water and my mother shading her eyes in the doorway could be the starting point of so much creativity.
The object that has featured in all of my work this year is a model of this boat. The doors and windows placed only where they are visible in this photograph. Cast because the trace is interesting to me. It is memory of place, affection, nostalgia and the myths we author that saturate this work. Delicate and dreamlike, just a little impossible and with, hopefully, a touch of magic it teeters preposterously on spider limbs. It is the echo of a memory, it is there and not there.
The sculpture itself is full of movement, flickering shadows, and moving image. The video that fills one end was filmed through a Camera Obscura. The houseboat floats in and out of the frame, its features are blurred, the outlines indistinct. The Camera Obscura become a mediator, it creates a further distance between source and image. It is a reflection, captured and abstracted through inversion. The tracing paper screen creates a visual quality that is dreamlike and reminiscent of old film. You can see this video here
Here and Here are additional videos filmed at the Shoreditch show.
Here and Here are additional videos filmed and and edited by Micheal Hooper, you can find him here
INSIDE OUT 2012
Statement
Who are we? Are we the sum of our experiences? A soup of sensation and memory stirred with the spoon of subjectivity? Aside from the “thin edge of the present” everything is memory. But is there more to us than the memory of our experience? What about collective and cultural memory? What sort of memory does an archetypal image conjure?
I am interested in distances and the spaces between. Things that are lost in dark corners or hidden in plain view; the forgotten, misplaced and the unconscious, the spaces where the dust of memory lies
With this work I am suggesting that we can all understand a relationship with home that may be uneasy. The sculpture is more than the archetypal ‘haunted house’ that Freud describes. The house is eerie but also compelling. Like a Grimms fairy tale, it is appealing but at the same time, just a little scary.
METAMORPHOSIS 2011
Statement
When a secret is bottled up it begins to fester. If the secret is repressed, left unacknowledged it can start to do harm. If the secret is big enough and the repression deep enough the energy required to ignore its, ever more frantic, signals for attention can interfere with 'normal' functioning. There is evidence that it can cause psychological problems and if profound can cause what we know of as a 'breakdown'.
I became interested in the cause and effect of secrets after someone close to me suffered from a breakdown. It occurred to me that a secret need not be shared with another person but that perhaps its potential harm could be dissipated through the act of writing. The globes are impenetrable, the holes, just big enough for a secret written and scrolled, and pushed through. Once inside the secrets are safe, they will never be read. At the end of exhibition the globes are fired in a Raku/sawdust firing during which the paper is burnt to ash, the secret becomes a part of the fabric of the ceramic. They are there and not there.
CHRYSALIS 2011
Statement
The starlings that flock and wheel over the moor of North Cornwall were the starting point for a body of work that resulted in a sustained investigation into communication. I am interested in the difference between what is said and what is heard and what is understood and what was meant, the spaces between words and meanings. It is a miracle that understanding happens at all.
I am also interested in the myths and legends that families author, sometimes to obscure the truth and other-times to illustrate a point. It is a surprising part of becoming an adult, when we question these stories and understand what they have meant in terms of the people we think we are.
Inside Out 2012
Video
This video is a fairly simple turning around of space. It is the attic bedroom of our house filmed from one end toward the end window, (on a sunny day). This video is projected from the other direction toward the same window on to the outside of the house at night. The soundtrack is a mixture of a very low domestic hum and the evening birdsong recorded in my garden.
I have always been interested in Rachel Whiteread’s ghost, which is a room literally turned inside out, it's empty space changed to solid, the private area on show. There is a reading of the word uncanny that is particular to houses, in the book The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler talks about the uncomfortable feeling we can get when confronted with the private in public. We must all have seen half demolished buildings, and stopped to examine the painted or wallpapered walls, fireplaces hanging above missing floors, marks of missing furniture or picture frames, and spent a few minutes imagining the lives that may have been lived there. Reading these signs as the memory of the building.
https://vimeo.com/59477278
Echo Obscured
Video
The Camera Obscura, like a pinhole camera, allows light into a darkened space through the smallest of holes. The light passes in, crosses over and projects the outside, inside but upside down. The inside of the camera becomes a miniature theatre, its end surface the screen.
With a pinhole camera you capture the image on photographic paper, with my Camera Obscura the image is projected onto tracing paper and my digital camera films from that. The Camera Obscura become a mediator, it creates a further distance between source and image. It is a reflection, captured and abstracted through inversion. The tracing paper screen creates a visual quality that is dreamlike. It is reminiscent of old film.
https://vimeo.com/67959815
Underfloor 2012
Video
I have been reading Bachelard’s Poetics of Space which inspired a poetic look at the home as a being with a memory. I wanted to make a video that explored the space under the floorboards of a house, capturing on camera what detritus may have collected there. I imagined that the 'House' had engineered the small disappearances. That these little items, lost and forgotten by the inhabitants, were the mementos it secreted.
The soundtrack is made up of different household noises, washing machine, tumble dryer, low voices, hoover with all the volume levels carefully controlled to create a white noise.
Yi Fu Tuan said,
“Place acquires deep meaning for adults through a steady accretion of sentiment, not through grand happenings but through small, nameless intimate experiences”
This is significant to this work, the video is a quiet look at the memory contained in a place, home. Not through drama or sentimentality but through layers of everyday memories built up over time.
https://vimeo.com/59477279
Paper Birds- 2011
Video
Stop frame animation.
https://vimeo.com/39222412
I don't know anything about you, can you tell me who you are? 2012
video
This video is an investigation into the area between saying and being; what role human interactions and communicating, whether verbal or gestural, informs our identity and sense of self.
I find it interesting that my participants, who had no obligation to speak to me, all valiantly tried to come up with an answer to my question and in front of my camera. I wanted to just show the initial responses, which in most cases displayed nervousness and an inclination to think carefully before talking. I have an intuition that we monitor before we speak and if one could get beyond the words we might engage in a more honest exchanges.
https://vimeo.com/39220458
History, Memory and Place
I create installations and painted works that observe and reflect the memory contained in a place. Not through drama or the memory of traumatic events but through a lens of nostalgia, displacement and loss.
I use whatever materials suit the project. I love working with salvaged or found materials for the narrative that they bring with them. Old windows are a favourite, I also have a collection of discarded dolls house furniture and dolls houses that make occasional appearances in installations along with digital video works and other sculptural forms to create environments that are inviting or intriguing and sometimes uncanny.
My paintings are oil paint on wood scavenged from building sites and tips, it pleases me to reuse materials and they add an element of chance, in size or form. My paintings start with a horizon line and develop as I move paint around the surface. I am taking a traditional genre like landscape and applying the themes of home and displacement and loss.
A GAME OF CONSEQUENCES 2015
I made this work while taking part in a collaborative project called 'Game of Consequences'. The project involved 20 artists who would respond to work handed to them by the artist before them in the chain... like the parlour game 'consequences' The game started with a 2m square canvas. There were no rules, only that we had to work in secrecy and that we worked for 10 days only on the 'work' but that we could make other works that were influenced by participation. What excited me most about the project was having no knowledge of what I would be starting with and the limited time-frame. When my time came to collect the artwork I was really surprised and a little disappointed that the work was still a canvas. I was prepared to receive a song, or a poem, or a jar of ashes but I did not expect the canvas. This video is what I made... and when it came time to pass the work to the next artist I passed along this film on a memory stick.
ECHO 2013
Statement
Not long ago I came across a photograph I had never seen before. It was a snapshot of my mother standing in the door of the houseboat home in which I spent my early childhood. The picture is extraordinary, not because of a superior quality of light, or composition or any technical aspect. It is extraordinary in that it is the first photograph I have ever seen of the house, just the house.
I have seen photographs from a distance in which the houseboat makes up a bit of the background. I have pored over them for hours attempting to tease from my memory the unseen details of architecture and details of the living that the building contained.
So this extraordinary photograph came like a gift. The gift it brought was a starting point for a body of writing about homes and how we dwell within them, and it was the starting point for a body of studio work that has brought me up to this point. It came as a complete surprise to me that the one rather faded and blown out picture of sunshine on water and my mother shading her eyes in the doorway could be the starting point of so much creativity.
The object that has featured in all of my work this year is a model of this boat. The doors and windows placed only where they are visible in this photograph. Cast because the trace is interesting to me. It is memory of place, affection, nostalgia and the myths we author that saturate this work. Delicate and dreamlike, just a little impossible and with, hopefully, a touch of magic it teeters preposterously on spider limbs. It is the echo of a memory, it is there and not there.
The sculpture itself is full of movement, flickering shadows, and moving image. The video that fills one end was filmed through a Camera Obscura. The houseboat floats in and out of the frame, its features are blurred, the outlines indistinct. The Camera Obscura become a mediator, it creates a further distance between source and image. It is a reflection, captured and abstracted through inversion. The tracing paper screen creates a visual quality that is dreamlike and reminiscent of old film. You can see this video here
Here and Here are additional videos filmed at the Shoreditch show.
Here and Here are additional videos filmed and and edited by Micheal Hooper, you can find him here
INSIDE OUT 2012
Statement
Who are we? Are we the sum of our experiences? A soup of sensation and memory stirred with the spoon of subjectivity? Aside from the “thin edge of the present” everything is memory. But is there more to us than the memory of our experience? What about collective and cultural memory? What sort of memory does an archetypal image conjure?
I am interested in distances and the spaces between. Things that are lost in dark corners or hidden in plain view; the forgotten, misplaced and the unconscious, the spaces where the dust of memory lies
With this work I am suggesting that we can all understand a relationship with home that may be uneasy. The sculpture is more than the archetypal ‘haunted house’ that Freud describes. The house is eerie but also compelling. Like a Grimms fairy tale, it is appealing but at the same time, just a little scary.
METAMORPHOSIS 2011
Statement
When a secret is bottled up it begins to fester. If the secret is repressed, left unacknowledged it can start to do harm. If the secret is big enough and the repression deep enough the energy required to ignore its, ever more frantic, signals for attention can interfere with 'normal' functioning. There is evidence that it can cause psychological problems and if profound can cause what we know of as a 'breakdown'.
I became interested in the cause and effect of secrets after someone close to me suffered from a breakdown. It occurred to me that a secret need not be shared with another person but that perhaps its potential harm could be dissipated through the act of writing. The globes are impenetrable, the holes, just big enough for a secret written and scrolled, and pushed through. Once inside the secrets are safe, they will never be read. At the end of exhibition the globes are fired in a Raku/sawdust firing during which the paper is burnt to ash, the secret becomes a part of the fabric of the ceramic. They are there and not there.
CHRYSALIS 2011
Statement
The starlings that flock and wheel over the moor of North Cornwall were the starting point for a body of work that resulted in a sustained investigation into communication. I am interested in the difference between what is said and what is heard and what is understood and what was meant, the spaces between words and meanings. It is a miracle that understanding happens at all.
I am also interested in the myths and legends that families author, sometimes to obscure the truth and other-times to illustrate a point. It is a surprising part of becoming an adult, when we question these stories and understand what they have meant in terms of the people we think we are.
Inside Out 2012
Video
This video is a fairly simple turning around of space. It is the attic bedroom of our house filmed from one end toward the end window, (on a sunny day). This video is projected from the other direction toward the same window on to the outside of the house at night. The soundtrack is a mixture of a very low domestic hum and the evening birdsong recorded in my garden.
I have always been interested in Rachel Whiteread’s ghost, which is a room literally turned inside out, it's empty space changed to solid, the private area on show. There is a reading of the word uncanny that is particular to houses, in the book The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler talks about the uncomfortable feeling we can get when confronted with the private in public. We must all have seen half demolished buildings, and stopped to examine the painted or wallpapered walls, fireplaces hanging above missing floors, marks of missing furniture or picture frames, and spent a few minutes imagining the lives that may have been lived there. Reading these signs as the memory of the building.
https://vimeo.com/59477278
Echo Obscured
Video
The Camera Obscura, like a pinhole camera, allows light into a darkened space through the smallest of holes. The light passes in, crosses over and projects the outside, inside but upside down. The inside of the camera becomes a miniature theatre, its end surface the screen.
With a pinhole camera you capture the image on photographic paper, with my Camera Obscura the image is projected onto tracing paper and my digital camera films from that. The Camera Obscura become a mediator, it creates a further distance between source and image. It is a reflection, captured and abstracted through inversion. The tracing paper screen creates a visual quality that is dreamlike. It is reminiscent of old film.
https://vimeo.com/67959815
Underfloor 2012
Video
I have been reading Bachelard’s Poetics of Space which inspired a poetic look at the home as a being with a memory. I wanted to make a video that explored the space under the floorboards of a house, capturing on camera what detritus may have collected there. I imagined that the 'House' had engineered the small disappearances. That these little items, lost and forgotten by the inhabitants, were the mementos it secreted.
The soundtrack is made up of different household noises, washing machine, tumble dryer, low voices, hoover with all the volume levels carefully controlled to create a white noise.
Yi Fu Tuan said,
“Place acquires deep meaning for adults through a steady accretion of sentiment, not through grand happenings but through small, nameless intimate experiences”
This is significant to this work, the video is a quiet look at the memory contained in a place, home. Not through drama or sentimentality but through layers of everyday memories built up over time.
https://vimeo.com/59477279
Paper Birds- 2011
Video
Stop frame animation.
https://vimeo.com/39222412
I don't know anything about you, can you tell me who you are? 2012
video
This video is an investigation into the area between saying and being; what role human interactions and communicating, whether verbal or gestural, informs our identity and sense of self.
I find it interesting that my participants, who had no obligation to speak to me, all valiantly tried to come up with an answer to my question and in front of my camera. I wanted to just show the initial responses, which in most cases displayed nervousness and an inclination to think carefully before talking. I have an intuition that we monitor before we speak and if one could get beyond the words we might engage in a more honest exchanges.
https://vimeo.com/39220458
