Statement
I am an inheritor of the European Sublime. At a time when we are again acutely aware of the indomitability of natural forces, the Sublime is again cogent.
My practice is part sculptural, part pictorial; in an inversion of conventional practice I start with object-making and end with drawing. I make, find and repair models, montaging them in dioramas with Sublime climate effects, often quoted verbatim from Romantic originals. The final large images are painstakingly accumulated out of tiny ballpoint pen marks on paper, speaking to the heroic futility of attempting to repair a damaged planet. Active or passive, they also refer to emotional states using visionary and hypnagogic displacement, disproportion and distortions of scale in the visualisation of psychic as well as physical threat.
My framing and cadrage are informed by a twenty year career in the film industry, the drawings are windows to a threatened world; it is dusk, never dawn, and in the failing light the shapes and meanings of objects are not quite apprehensible. It is not a nightmare world, but between waking and sleep; what was safe is safe no longer, and what was familiar is now tainted by dread. The harbour becomes the sea and mountains tip towards avalanche.
It is envisaged that my practice will continue to examine the impact of planetary degradation through drawings of found, repaired and made objects that exploit the inherited Sublime impulse to overwhelm the viewer with content, scale and technique.
I am an inheritor of the European Sublime. At a time when we are again acutely aware of the indomitability of natural forces, the Sublime is again cogent.
My practice is part sculptural, part pictorial; in an inversion of conventional practice I start with object-making and end with drawing. I make, find and repair models, montaging them in dioramas with Sublime climate effects, often quoted verbatim from Romantic originals. The final large images are painstakingly accumulated out of tiny ballpoint pen marks on paper, speaking to the heroic futility of attempting to repair a damaged planet. Active or passive, they also refer to emotional states using visionary and hypnagogic displacement, disproportion and distortions of scale in the visualisation of psychic as well as physical threat.
My framing and cadrage are informed by a twenty year career in the film industry, the drawings are windows to a threatened world; it is dusk, never dawn, and in the failing light the shapes and meanings of objects are not quite apprehensible. It is not a nightmare world, but between waking and sleep; what was safe is safe no longer, and what was familiar is now tainted by dread. The harbour becomes the sea and mountains tip towards avalanche.
It is envisaged that my practice will continue to examine the impact of planetary degradation through drawings of found, repaired and made objects that exploit the inherited Sublime impulse to overwhelm the viewer with content, scale and technique.