My work explores our often traumatic response to the symbolic language of state, religion, and authority. Through a multidisciplinary approach involving sculpture, painting, and found materials, I interrogate how power structures imprint themselves on collective and personal memory. I am also drawn more and more to the theme of decay and the concept that nothing is ever permanent - even the most durable materials are prey to erosion and destruction. My three years spent studying Art have been for me a gradual development of ideas and questions which have led to the inspiration for my current pieces. The experience as a whole has fuelled a posture of openness and curiosity. Thanks to the availability of different methods of expression (glass moulding, metalwork, concrete) I have been led to a place of exploration and development as I find new ways of working.
Since spending a year in Germany, my work has become more raw and direct as a result of the Stuttgart cityscape and my introduction to different media and skills such as glass casting and stonework. The influence of Stuttgart’s Brutalist architecture has given me the confidence to experiment with a more minimalist way of working. Stuttgart is a city very much still under construction and I am now beginning to experiment with art pieces that appear incomplete.
Informed by experiences abroad and exposure to different cultural ideologies, my work explores how institutional symbolism—particularly that of the state and religious authority—shapes our identity and ultimately social order. I am interested in the spirit of the individual and how it exists under the rule (benign or otherwise) of institutions. I am also trying to explore how the same spirit not just exists but flourishes under the restrictions of a system or institution. Heavy materials and monochromatic colour were deliberately chosen to evoke a post-war landscape that is both hopeful (reconstruction after devastation) and ominous (former Eastern Bloc cityscapes).
My art is a multimedia response to a variety of stimuli, ranging from my everyday surroundings to monuments and iconography. In it I incorporate a range of different practices, mainly combining both painting and sculpture but also including elements of photography, textiles and collage. Industrial landscapes and structures greatly influence me. The stripped back quality of modern man-made cityscapes, frequently in a limited, monochromatic palette, is something I am drawn to and inspired by. I find, paradoxically, the aesthetic in the un-aesthetic. Linked to this, what I am drawn to more and more in my work is the tension between the new and finished versus the every present process of decay. (An example would be urban settings where new buildings are erected, are briefly pristine, and then begin the process of change almost immediately.) I am also influenced by the opposite: the process of construction. At the moment I am experimenting with creating works that have the rebar armature displayed. Again, the themes of construction and destruction, and the concept of everything being impermanent continue to fascinate me.
