Artist’s Statement
My practice explores being alive, embodied and gendered. Through my work I seek meaningful ways to inhabit the world, discovering meanings in the spaces in between things, people and places. I seek to make sense of things. I celebrate my fluid and shifting identity as a woman and maintain a dancing on the boundaries, a making and re-making of identity.
My many years working with people impacts on my practice, the physical and emotional intimacy of being with another through times of intense difficulty and pain, through madness, disease and to death, has taught me the power of stillness, tears and laughter. All tongue in cheek and dead serious. Embracing the weight of being with a light heart, playfulness threads through my work, with references to childhood games, dressing-up and pretending.
Objects are constructed alongside meaning, from a glimpse of a form leading to a suggestion of media alongside research, thinking and re-thinking the concepts – an essential part of the process. The research of theories around gender, identity and landscape forms a background to the work which develops through the process of manipulating media and ideas in the studio. Archetypes and symbolic beings weave their way through the work – from angels to current concerns with slugs (a more embodied androgyny).
The use of fabric and sewing to construct pieces - womanly materials - is an element of gendered practice, a turning away from traditional art-making materials. Leather provides more sculptural possibilities whilst retaining an element of sewing; as flesh it also provides a manifestation of the physical/bodily in the work. The leather used is not exotic, it is the material used for bags, shoes and belts – mundane, everyday stuff. The more recent collages introduce other domestic materials – a cloth, fake grass matting, house paint, toilet paper – alongside the leather.
