Post-Alternative-Statement: You Want the Truth? You Can’t Handle The Truth…

I can’t tell you how much I hate talking about my art. I dread conversations with nominally interested parties in which I regurgitate the contents of some indigestible artist’s statement all over an unwitting victim who was just trying to make small talk. I’ve read the advice countless times – keep your statement simple, direct, accessible. Ha!

I make art precisely because I’m trying to understand and communicate things we can’t pin words on (isn’t that what all artists are doing?). And they want me to write about it: the irony (deadpan face emoji).

So, if we really must, here are some bullet points:

• There is an ongoing attempt to reconcile the gap between narrative and reality – very related to autism in the particular, but also, of course, a universal philosophical problem for humanity.
• I am often trying to connect thought to physicality/ attempted reduction of dualism – bringing together thought and feeling rather than understanding them as either qualitatively different or opposing ends of an axis – trying to evoke the sense of ‘feeling’ your thoughts. In so doing, on the micro level, it brings others towards autistic experience, but on the macro/universal level, a philosophical discourse around the nature of consciousness. It’s a yearning to communicate on a deep and authentic level, in a place beyond language. I firmly believe visual art allows us to explore complex philosophical issues in ways we can’t otherwise approach.
• There is a deep warmth/ love for humanity/ plea to universalism or a sort of transcendence, from a desperate imperative to communicate. As the kind of human I am, I can’t function in a world where people are confined to superficial silos and art is a self-defeating impoverished tool. I think this work and outlook is timely in our polarised age (but somewhat heterodox to current artworld sensibilities), whilst also being gentle, experiential, complex, and undidactic.
• Current relevance: All of the above means I’ve spent the last few years being fascinated by the collapse of materialisism and its replacement with narrative analysis. The severing of words from reality, proceeding from the digital age (gloss without substance is a function of the medium – feature not bug), and the rise of curation of the self, etc. Disability means, for me, in this reality, I am shut out – the already tiny sliver of the world I can inhabit and understand is deleted, replaced with something I experience as sophistry, yet is inexplicably ‘reality’ for other people. An emperor’s-new-clothes sort of thing.
• Moving forward: I have been moving my practise away from the more politicised aspects of my early practice, which I now regard almost as juvenilia, into this more complex and difficult, but authentic space.
• Aesthetically, I have developed what I think is now quite a recognisable style. Fragile materials such as paper or porcelain, often in some kind of ‘jeorpardy’ creating tension in the viewer, tortuous processes, combining seemingly inappropriate materials, that kind of thing.

back to: Artist’s Statement

back to: Alternative Statement: The Wankier Version