I am a site-specific artist and I work with objects and materials that are close to me. Fundamental to my work is an awareness of the potential for a creative experience in any environment.
I explore the potential in ordinary things, remaining attentive whilst working intuitively and responding to the dialogue that exists between me and the materials. I surrender to the materials, and I follow where they lead, embracing the notion of ‘not knowing’. At the core of my practice is my interest in the way materials, objects and the natural world can have such a powerful influence over me, and how they excite and empower me.
I am aware of objects and spaces vying for attention and I respond to this, by allowing the materials or objects to become instructive – the materials and I are intra-acting in a way that means there is no hierarchy between me, my surroundings, and the materials.
In working this way, I become an actant in an ongoing performance that is happening all the time, and all around.
I walk through my kitchen and have an urgent encounter with some miscellaneous objects on the kitchen table. They are there and ‘suddenly vibrant’ and needed attending too. I make a drawing; I move a book. I become distracted by the book and open it. I turn the page and ‘boom’ – there it is. I keep looking. It’s beautiful. I am immersed in the forming story.
Key words that underpin my practice:
Appetition
noun
A desire or craving directed towards a specific object, goal or purpose. (Collins)
Collaboration
variable noun (in noun)
Collaboration is the act of working together to produce a piece of work, especially a book or some research. (Collins 2020)
Entanglement
“To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence” (Barad, 2007: p. xi)
Immanence
Immanence is defined as the state of being present as a natural and permanent part of something. To say that a quality is immanent in a particular thing, means that the thing possessing that quality cannot exist or be imagined without it. (Collins, 2020).
Intra- action
Barad (2007: p.141) neatly encapsulates intra-action with the following definition: “Intra- action is a term used to replace ‘interaction,’ which necessitates pre-established bodies that then participate in action with each other. Intra-action understands agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably.”
Potential
adjective (adjective noun)
You use potential to say that someone or something is capable of developing into the particular kind of person or thing mentioned.
hidden.
likely
possible
probable
budding
future
abeyant
conceivable.