Artist statement
The world abounds with fascinating materials, transformative processes and unexpected connections. As an artist, curator and initiator, I delight in them all. My work often begins with an attraction to a particular material, experimenting with its physical qualities, histories and transformative potential. In the studio, I use artistic processes on everyday materials and craft techniques on traditional art supplies, mixing methodologies to encourage discovery and innovation. These initial experiments develop into sculptures, installations, objects, moving image, performances and publications. Aware of my Protestant tendencies toward monotonous labour, I create projects that satisfy this desire, requiring cutting, folding, stitching, sorting and assembling.
Over time my practice has expanded beyond the studio into curatorial and collaborative projects that create contexts for artistic exchange, research and public engagement. Through artist residencies, exhibitions, interdisciplinary collaborations and long-term initiatives, I am interested not only in making artworks, but in creating the conditions in which new conversations and unexpected encounters can emerge.
As an internationally active artist, I became aware that my work was more often encountered as a digital image online or printed in a catalogue than as a physical object. This prompted an interest in the relationship between image and object, space, location and time, leading to investigations into dimensions and the ways objects, places and experiences can be translated from one form to another. More recently, this thinking has expanded through collaborative research projects such as Void Fraction, which follows limestone through geology, quarry landscapes, architecture and deep time. Here, materials become both subject and collaborator, connecting human experience with geological processes across past and future timescales.
For more than two decades I have been a perpetual foreigner, living and working across different cultures and situations. Making art has become a way of situating myself within a place, understanding its landscapes, histories, materials and communities. At the same time, this position has made me acutely aware of context and the stories that accompany artworks. Sometimes I play with these expectations; at other times I seek to neutralise references to place altogether, allowing materials, processes and relationships to speak for themselves.
As a whole, my practice combines a love of diverse materials, attentiveness to craft, playfulness in scale, and a sustained curiosity about transformation, collaboration and place. Whether through an object, an exhibition, a publication or a collaborative project, I am interested in creating relationships—between materials and people, landscapes and histories, disciplines and ideas, deep time and the present.