*PYO Artist’s Statement
A Statement:
I am an artist based in the UK. Sometimes I create large kinetic installation, sometimes tiny fragile sculptures. I often work with paper. I now use porcelain quite a bit. There’s photography, too. My earlier work was sometimes political, but these days I am more interested in transcendence, human universals, and that which is beyond division.
Some brain and body stuff I wouldn’t bore you with means I inhabit somewhat of a parallel world. So, I always found myself compelled to explore how we experience reality. My work tends to be experiential, visceral, and emotionally charged; sometimes it feels organic or imparts a sense of the uncanny. The best way I can put it is that I think I’m trying to make people *feel* their thoughts.
I work in a variety of media. My paper interventions, for example, are fragile and ephemeral, and rely on photographic recording. Making them perhaps verges on performance, because of the lengthy repetitive nature of the make (an interesting counterpoint to the often short-lived result), as well as the sometimes absurd difficulty of placing the paper in the environment. They inhabit a hinterland between installation, performance, and photography. This kind of work is related to disability but, of course, absurdity and futility is something we can all relate to.
Much of my work is constructed from book pages, which relates to uncertainty about the relationship of language to the world. Building a material thing with text is a doomed attempt to bridge the gap between language and reality, a kind of category mistake, endlessly failing to reconcile the irreconcilable. It’s very connected to autism and the difficulty of trying to make sense of the world via language, a non-native operating system, which renders the world exhausting and incomprehensible to me.
Over the years, coming back to particular materials and forms means an emergent sculptural vocabulary has coalesced. Most notably, cone shapes – some think of me as ‘the cone lady’. Eggshells recur, as does paper/text in many forms. More recently, porcelain is a material of choice. At least it’s archival, if not necessarily robust (I imagine it’s more robust when not threaded on springs or bouncing rods…)
Alternative Statement: The Wankier Version
Post-Alternative Statement: Come n Hear the Truth, Mofo
*PYO: acronym for ‘Pick Your Own’, used especially on UK fruit farms.