ABOUT

I am a Birmingham based artist working with diverse media, including paint, printmaking, film and digital photography, digital media and installation. I have a particular concern for, and fascination with process within both art and within craft traditions. I am especially drawn to intricate or technical processes such as printmaking, photography, bookmaking or rubber stamping, which provide for a certain level of mastery of process, aesthetic, and perfection of outcome.

My recent work, explores how repetition within the context of an art process, and exploration of a particular aesthetic, can also function as a form of self-therapy.  Works derived from my diary entries involve processing, transcribing, repeating or transforming words, phrases or entire pages from my diary using various processes such as scribing, painting, printmaking, digital print, and bookmaking, and explore the transformation of meaning through subtle or more significant changes of process, material and context.  

The current context of lockdown finds me producing work derived from diary entries in my lived environment. My bedroom has become at once, the surface that I work on, the space that I live in, a personal and private performance space, and an evolving installation. Multiple and varied surfaces – wall, window, fabric, mirror and so on, are filled with writings, transcribed and overlayed to obscure meaning, using graphite, acrylic and marker pens. The bedroom has become the pages of the diary – writings leave the page, becomes physically rendered, but also meaning-obscured through the overlaying of words, and thus undergo a transformation.

My diary is expanding into my room, growing and spreading, being made physical - the words expelled from the pages and into my physical space in graphite, acrylic and marker pen. I am now living inside my diary: the walls, furniture and objects, the pages and words enveloping me, yet through the personal performance of transcribing and obscuring the words, the meaning and emotive power of the original writings, and the experience from which they arose, becomes neutered and benign. At the same time, another transformation is taking place through the synthesis of media, surface, shape and pattern, the words take on a new abstract aesthetic and become art. In this way it becomes both therapy and production of art object.  The act of making art functions as a kind of meditation, the ritual and process of producing becoming a space for reflection and recovery.