ABOUT MY WORK
Within the past year my work has become far more self expressive and perhaps even 'selfish'. There is a far more personal connection that I've established with my work, using my work in an almost cathartic way. More often than not my work has an aim to emote to the audience. My goal is usually to bring my audience into the same happy and calm place that I am when I finish making my pieces.
I create my artworks using a mixture of fabric, predominantly linen-looking, with acrylic paint, builder’s plaster, and grout. The choice to transition from sturdy canvasses to easily manipulated and foldable fabric was one that would allow me to further experiment with my fascination of when an artwork is classified as either a painting or a sculpture and where these distinctions overlap. My work was originally made to question the traditional classification of art; how is a work considered a painting and when does it become a sculpture? The experimentation and overlapping of these two disciplines originates from a fascination with texture, the history of art and how classification is based on comparison - how pieces can be related to other works - where they fit in along the vast history of the subject. Generally, seeing whether others agreed that constantly comparing contemporary artists to long, dead ones, no matter how great they were, will rarely be a productive tool. It is merely a method of giving reassurance to those who view it, what to think when first seeing something ‘new’.
The exhibition of my artworks attempt to mimic how they were hung and stored in my studio space; together, an overlapping collection of materials that both oppose and work alongside each other. Displaying my works individually would remove the injected context of my own production space. The audience should be surrounded by my pieces, much how I am when I'm creating in my studio space. Incorporating my production space and process allows a far more personal experience and connection between artist and audience through the work. This is why I feel very conflicted with having a website, none of my work can be shown the way it was intended. Vast pieces of work that consume your being, you become one with the piece once you enter its space. Unfortunately, this documentation is the best we can do in these "unprecedented times".
Without sounding pretentious, I partake in advanced finger painting. I’m trying to reject the famed, historical overly serious art knowledge that people ‘think’ they should have and I want to draw the audience into my lighthearted approach without the audience needing to have a degree to make them happy. The presumption that you must know everything about the context of the work; the artist, other works, and varying amounts of art history to understand what you’re looking at is personally, quite ridiculous to me. Whilst it does allow for some additional enjoyment in the piece with some extra context, it should not be what carries a piece into success which should in fact be measured by whether the piece makes you feel, regardless of what that feeling actually is. This is perhaps why I place so much importance on the production of the work and the studio space it is created in.
My work was never meant to be complicated or to possess some deeper metaphor about the world, it’s about the connection the audience has with the work.