Artist Statement

I use my practice as a way of wrapping my head around what it means to be in the world, to understand the body and its lived experiences. Thinking through drawing, making, and writing, I am interested in ways of knowing that are shaped by our entire body. Using personal experiences and observations as touchpoints, I make work to stretch out a stable sense of anatomy and think beyond the head as the sole locus of knowledge. 

 

I like to test the physicality of things. Governed by an embodied way of working, I push and pull materials and words about to investigate what it feels like. There is a way of getting to know the world that comes through touching it. 

 

I bend steel around my body, angle-grind it with my arms, and fix it place with my muscles as I weld. I mix and mash plaster with my fingers. I dissect MDF, embed screens, trail leads, and handle lines. Making is like exercise as I negotiate physical gestures and movements and interlock them into shapes and linear forms. 

 

My making is mobilised by research into embodied cognition, the language of materials, thinghood, and rooting around in the thresholds of drawing and sculpture. Spatiality also pervades my work. Often taking the form of installations, my works behave like a topography. The body of work interacts with the bodies around it. It is an encounter to be navigated, moved through and about, like a terrain. The viewer becomes implicit in this.