Heavily influenced by a childhood immersed in my father’s eccentric collections, from voodoo dolls to 18th Century farm implements, I am a multi-disciplinary sculptor, working with an eclectic range of materials including wood, copper, bronze, clay and textiles.
Fascinated by the idea of Michel Foucault’s Heterotopias, spaces that are “other” I weave strange worlds with ambiguous narratives and am drawn to ideas around magic and transformation. Nature is at once a safe haven and a place of impending danger – a duality that is explored in many of my projects. Forests in particular are a recurring image in my practice as places of enchantment and unease.
My work is about concealing and revealing, what emotions and stories we bring to a woodland and those that have been left behind by previous generations. It is about a place of discovery, a magical place that may soon be lost. A place of quiet sadness. It is about the crossing of thresholds and individual narratives, about forests as witnesses to human history Silent witnesses of forgotten histories. Histories that are both real and imagined. Places of mystery, refuges from containment. Places of magic and transition.
Light plays an essential role in my work, allowing me to examine the threshold between interconnected worlds: the imagined and the real, the public and the private - often with underlying themes of mystery, dread and threat.
In a wider context my work can be seen as a reflection of the world we live in today. Futurologists describe the world as BANI, brittle and fragile, anxious, non linear and incomprehensible. An overwhelming feeling of being lost in a chaotic world full of contradictions.