protoPLAY

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Having graduated from the University of Brighton in 2006 with a BA in Fine Art Sculpture, I am currently developing a project entitled ‘The Third Space’.  A collaboration between curator Polly Carter, three installation artists including myself, and other members of protoPLAY, it will take place in the Regency Townhouse, Brighton, in late July 2007.

Fascinated by dreams and theories of the unconscious, my work is created instinctively, developing a poetic understanding of materials and their symbolic significance. Innevitably fragile and ephemeral, it exists in precarious relationship with its surroundings. Using familiar objects and substances associated with our everyday experience, in particular the home, I hopes to weave narratives that elicit very personal responses within viewers. Food is often used, playfully transformed within the context of the work, to become unrecognisably beautiful and mysterious or peutrified and decomposing. Fundamental and universally experienced, associated with nurture and lack, desire and disgust, food is intimately associated with our bodies. Crossing the boundaries between the inner and the outer, it has potential to elicit very powerful physical and emotional responses within us.

The work often speaks of the body; forms are organ-like, fluids viscous, materials organic and delicate as skin. I explore the inside of the body as the place in which we experience sensations associated with that about which we feel most deeply- gasping, yearning, nervous trembling, loving, fearing, the ache of despairing. To externalise and examine that which lies beneath the skin, is to ask questions about what we really feel and why we feel it. Stripping away the illusion of glamour and self constructed barriers, I hope to glimpse a more realistic portrait of the self- in its vulnerability, creativity, complexity and darkness.