Artist Statement
My creative practice has facilitated a personal exploration into the theme of a rupture between human and nature where the human is seen distinct from all that is non-human. The separation appears arises in unconscious “common sense” claiming “I know this” contradicting lived experience where we do not know.
Working with art materials I have been seeing nature as a metabolic process, what is natural as including all matter eternally moving but all transient never eternal in its form whether animal species, vegetable, mineral or vapour.
I am interested in artists that explore what it is to be human in material circumstances of recent history such as Kath Kollwitz woodcuts, etchings and drawings which depicting peasants in revolt and class conscious workers uprising in Germany 1918 then personal and global tragedies of a nationalist war.
I am particularly drawn to work by Magdalena Abakaniwicz working with hessian (burlap) and resin and making body shapes dehumanised by omitting features but which also have an organic nature as fused with the land that seems to me to be addressing similar ideas of nature and humanity as well as emotions in the body.
These influenced my sculptural and drawing explorations looking at material around and why they are there. I still hope to develop these in copper etching and intaglio printing when it is easier to do so.
The Covid restrictions led me to making prints recently using a flat rectangle of gelatine on which I can apply ink and pull monoprints from.
This has been while exploring the significance of materials around my local environment and how these relate to the stories of the settlements established by human needs and needs of production changing through industrialisation of extraction imperial conquest.
I looked at local artists who reflect a particular sense of place in relation to versions of history and am exploring what shapes my view of place.
I wanted to make work in relation to the local power station I saw demolished and turn from solid to dust in seconds. This seemed relevant as a demonstration of impermanence, matter moving and locally a symbol of hopes and fears expressed around plans for the site and the “green hills” that it sat on.
I continue to swing between doing something literal and representative and something more abstract.