Artist Statement

Performance to camera, installation and photography are the three main areas that my practice resides. Primarily working out with the studio, I take inspiration from diverse natural landscapes, engaging with organic elements and structures. I consider visiting museums, archives, libraries and local history centres, a vital component to my initial research. 

As my practice has developed I have adopted an increasingly sensitive approach to site specific installation. Recent work has responded directly to the architecture of a given space; the dimensions or shapes dictating the length or viewing method of my films. This approach corresponds with a interest in controlled observation, captivity, and power hierarchies within the animal and human world. Inspired by literary works such as Jonathan Swift’s novel Gullivers Travels and the writings of Italo Calvino, I use humour to subtly explore the absurdity and balance of human vs. animal, human vs. science and pathos vs. hysteria; three precarious states of play within the human condition. What can the non-human form provide as a bodily, spatial or communicative material?

I often enlist a variety of fictional characters that enable me to adopt an optimistic, naive and untainted approach to topics that can be melancholic or sociologically dark and complex. These characters tend to take the accessible form of a horse or a bird, two species of animal that are romanticised as symbols of freedom yet historically have a domesticated and subservient relationships to humans. Although my work is rooted in theory and historical debate there is an overriding aesthetic theme that transcends sober explanation and that is an ingrained desire to create irrational situations and images.  This has direct historical references to the use of ‘body’ in performance art and the search for a raw animalistic experience relating back to my earlier interest in phenomenology.