Artist Statement |
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My 3D work derives from line drawings featuring a repetitive motif, a doodle for want of a better word. I do not always start with a drawing on paper, sometimes I start to work in 3D, and one idea tends to evolve into another. The line drawings are complex and have a density that gives them a textural quality. I thought about what purpose it served to doodle, often it’s a means of escapism, an aid to thought, it can also disfigure or conceal. Doodling could be seen as decoration or an adornment, which made me think of tattoos and then I realised my ways of working, namely piercing, puncturing, scratching and cutting tied in with this. A Tattoo is something that is on the surface, and simultaneously under the surface, and so it is with matters of the psyche. Both tattoos and doodles could also be seen as a means of (paradoxically) unifying, or of separating. I am interested in Freudian ideas. I am working within the context of desire and ideas Freudian, in the context of anxiety or loss and control, the work takes the form of fetish. My influences are writers such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Emile Zola and musicians like The Cooper Temple Clause, Nina Simone and Nick Cave. Their work has its basis in the psychological aspects of human existence, and the emotions that drive us. I also find inspiration in the ideas involved in the Vanitas genre and the work of Hieronymus Bosch. Materials are very important to me. Both Tapies and Dubuffet used materials that were to hand and manipulated surfaces by scratching into paint, cutting and such. Tapies said, “No material is mean”. I prefer where possible to use the throwaway object, life's detritus. The fruit skins and peels being particularly apt in that they are good stand ins for human skin. They age, shrivel and rot, and they are manipulable. Like Louise bourgeois and Annette Messager I make work that sometimes reflects feminine craft traditions like knitting and sewing. My work is processed based using ritualised methods to articulate ideas involving decay, renewal, the psychological, repetition and change.
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