ARTIST STATEMENT

My production of objects makes use of and refers to the highly specific materials, processes and functional items that societies and individuals use to answer their needs, wishes and desires: to mitigate dysfunction, fulfill lack and achieve aspiration. The work attempts to extend the artefact-evidence of our wishful thinking about our human capabilities beyond mere pragmatics, and into a more abstract emotional and psychological kind of anthropology.

Other works use photographic and video images to disrupt normal expectations, and depict often impossible physical states and scenarios as if they were real, using a combination of physical and digital manipulation to convincingly alter both body and environment. Playing with art’s own traditions, the depictions of other disciplines, and the multiple iconographies of aspiration and desire, these images compound modes of bodily representation and confound familiar divisions; the functional with the indulgent, the exalted with the debased, the iconic with the everyday.

The exploration of the power of site and environment to generate meaning and awareness is fundamental to my practice, with work increasingly being made for, and installed in, highly specific places and locations. Such work engages with particular disciplines and spheres of human operation on their own terms, and often in their own sites. Within the gallery context, it draws on physical and conceptual framing devices incorporated within its own structures, or consists of specially constructed environments which contain both viewer and artefact, transporting them into another architectural and intellectual reality.