Artist’s Statement

In the cockpit of my VW Polo sanctuary, cloudscapes role by on my physical and metaphysical journey. I look heavenwards for glory clouds into which to escape, capturing their ephemeral promise of freedom against the banality of the everyday.

Taking influence from the painted ceilings in Renaissance domes, where clouds act as a half-way point between Heaven and Earth, my work explores a contemporary struggle to be both rationally efficient and spiritually free, offering wilful daydreaming as a tantalizing escape from patriarchal conformity.

I work across a range of media, including drawing, printmaking, digital and analogue collage, sculpture and film, often combining materials, methods and found objects to create mixed media pieces, assemblages and lo-fi inventions.

I am interested in the dialogue between objects, images, media and materials, and how through moments of interruption and interjection, potential meaning can slip into other, awkward queer spaces.

I plunder instruction manuals and trawl the aisles of DIY stores for suitable parts to cobble together a home-made numinous that is at once familiar and unstable, artificial, and seductive. Gathering the paraphernalia of structure and order, I employ the misuse of functional objects as a strategy to create optimistic constructions that serve no purpose but to invite a moment of contemplation.

Playfulness and improvisation are important: repurposing and queering the use of materials for their visual language and metaphor, upending associations with gendered objects, exploring contradictions, creating unstable narratives that fall between earnest and silly, poetic and absurd.