Unit 2: Artist Statement

Governed by an embodied way of thinking, I use the methodology of drawing as a way of thinking through doing. There is a way of getting to know the world that comes through touching it. Drawing is my way of reiterating this touch. 

 

I push and pull materials about: I bend, angle grind, and weld steel; cut, stick, and paint wood; embed screens, trail leads, and handle lines. Traces of actions are left in the materials. The body is alluded to but never represented. Materials which are hard become flexible and intangible gestures become fixed.

 

Drawing on personal experiences and observations, I roll around ideas of the mind/body duality. I make work to understand the body and its lived experiences in a way that is stretched out beyond a stable sense of anatomy and thinking beyond the head as the sole locus of knowledge. 

 

Navigating the senses is inherently relational. It unsettles boundaries and loosens bearings and definitions. This spills out into testing the thresholds between things; language and materials, form and formlessness and drawing and sculpture. My works sit in a hinterland. They shape-shift and slip their way around these particular territories.

 

Often taking the form of installations, my works scale the wall and floor like a topography of touchpoints. Creating a network of references and interactions of parts and pieces and the moments between them. This encounter is to be navigated, moved through, like a terrain. The viewer becomes implicit in this.