Artist statement
Grounded in cross-disciplinary explorations that include sculpture, video, painting and found object-based installation practices, my work centres on conducting various experiments concerned with time, material and entropy. My studio exists as a kind of absurd laboratory in which my process-based works evolve from a series of predetermined self-imposed limitations and incongruous modes of working. My approach to these concerns often produces unexpected results, as my preference is to see what happens when things that don't really go together are nevertheless forced into being together. To do this I employ an ongoing process of constantly re-using all the materials in my studio, including all the dust, debris and waste created during the process of making work. Though with this the focus is really on the breaking apart of my previous art works to re-form them into new ones. I have been engaged with this project of constant transmogrification for over 3 years now. With each new work my concoctions grow increasingly abject and strange as the new works retain traces of their former, equally troubled existences. Through this process, time as inextricably linked to material becomes palpable in the work.
My work takes as its subject matter the architecture and infrastructure of the gallery as delivery system for art, and as much as possible attempts to work with the gallery as an extension of the studio. Blurring the boundaries between gallery and studio is important for my practice as at no time is the experiment (or work for that matter) ever finished - the objects may temporarily be at rest, but their work is not done. For it is here that my work attempts to explore the full potential of the phenomenological character of architecture and things, or the sentience of the objects in question. I often imagine that the various materials and forms I work with have developed consciousness and so I think about what the material might want for itself. Or better still, that this material is in charge of itself and is not so secretly making the decisions without me. And so in conceiving of my various projects, I often set up impossible tasks for myself so the work is about my own becoming as much as its own. Here the performative aspect of what it is to make something alongside the unavoidable entropy of material and culture can be seen side by side, the process and the result together again at last.