I have long been interested in the everyday procedures through which individuals, groups and societies come to value some people and not others. Much of my work explores how common sense beliefs, ordinary talk, body language, habits and routines, artefacts and built spaces perpetuate and/or contest patterns of inclusion and exclusion. It asks how our daily attitudes and experiences connect to wider societal processes and systems. How might unjust normative everyday practices be unraveled, exposed and transformed into more equitable relationships; starting from the personal, local and small-scale? What can be the role of fine art - if any - in enabling such a change? And what are the possibilities for finding and expressing alternative ways to thrive?
Installation. Pasting table, vinyl banner, found objects, wire, tape, paper and foam cutouts, glue.
MP4 video: 4 minutes 30 sec.
Additional fabrication: Ruairi Paxman
Additional photography and video: Ruairi Paxman, Hannah Chauncey and Nicky Lloyd-Owen
This work comprises a pasting table whose front legs have been cut and hinged, so that the table is kneeling down. On the lower end of the table a number of small randomly collected objects are ‘caught’ in the moment of cascading off; captured in a kind of suspended animation through the simple process of being held by wires. This might be a cornucopia, but it might also be an uncontrollable flood. Under the table is a not quite life-size photo-vinyl banner ‘carpet’ self portrait of me lying down. My mouth is open, as if to consume the objects as they fall. Meanwhile a cartoon at the other end of the table shows Elon Musk flying off (presumably to Mars) whilst the table rocks precariously, then falls over but recovers.
Watch the video of Capitalism eating itself on Vimeo.
Set of 4 framed 30 x 40 cm C-type silvertone prints with embroidery, ink tattoo, sequins and coloured dots (limited edition of 15 - with individualised embellishments).
This work begins from my own aging and chronically ill body - itself a moonscape of scars and damage but one that also embodies the realities and even beauty of human fragility. Each of the four photographs is embellished with childlike and joyful elements – sequins, tattoos, embroidery and coloured dots – to produce a form of interference effect that both celebrates the vulnerabilities of aging, and makes it more complicated to ‘see’.
30 x 40 cm giclee print (limited edition of 15)
In Made Up, layers of foundation, lipstick, eyeliner and eyeshadow and applied to B&W photocopies of a mouth in different poses. This give a sticky thickness to an image, a peculiar type of enhancement; exploring how we often operate at the level of appearances, and act to amend or improve our ‘looks’ (usually towards a societal ideal) or become masked or ‘pass’ as something else through the application of an artificial surface. At the same time, being made up suggests the potential both of ‘feeling good’ and of being obscured, of having an authentic self disappeared, of literally offering a lie.
B&W photocopy. lipstick, modroc
mp4 video: 7 minutes 15 secs
A video of a photocopy of a mouth slowly being covered up completely, first with lipstick and liner, then with a plaster and finally with a bandage - materials that can both protect and cover over.
Watch Sing Something Simple on Vimeo
mp4 Video. 1 minute 15 secs
This video short is made up of a series of long stills of various - but generically similar - hospital corridors, plain and institutional interiors with time given to look at these in detail, to appreciate both repetitions and differences across each. Only one short sequence shows movement - aiming to give a moment of surprise - and offering a different kind of embodiment, connecting to the spirit animal in all of us. Here, I am looking to express alternative ways to live beyond health/illness binaries, positing non-normativity and non-compliance as resistance to societal norms and valuing and celebrating our bio and neuro-diversity. Humour and playfulness are deliberate ways to challenge normative medicalisation and to explore richer ways of being in the world beyond health consumption.
Watch Sometimes I fee like an eagle on Vimeo.
mp4 video: 29 secs (looped)
This video is a sister piece to Sometimes I feel like an eagle. It concerns the pressures on all of us towards individual effort, fitness, productivity and competition (aspirations that are not available to all). There is a cacophony of running feet against a pale tarmac pavement, as fast breathing, fractured voices and footsteps fade in and out, generating a kind of obsessive and pressured sense of effort and anxiety, that makes the heart beat faster.
Watch Imperative! on Vimeo.
Mixed media collage 45 x 29.5 cm
DLA-HQA is the genetic code that indicates the likelihood of a chronic condition (in my case celiac disease). This collage deals with the implications of having a 'minor' illness, and its multiple, non-coherent and complicated associations that nonethless can disrupt healthy/ill binary oppositions and paradigms. I am interested in the ways the colours, textures and translucency of tracing paper, sellotape and poor quality photocopies resonate with the paraphernalia of medical supplies, such as bandages and plasters; forming an overall colour palette of pinky off-whites, transparent greys and jaundiced yellows, suggestive of both hospital environments and aging skin.
C-type colour photographs, steel and perspex frames.
An installation piece using self-portraiture combined with social documentary that explores the complexities of aging as a white cis-gender woman.
C-type photographs, hanging installation
Photographs exhibited at Spinach offices London, in collaboration with photographer Pierre Alozie.
Various materials, workshop
An interactive workshop run with different groups in a variety of contexts over several years. LOLO asks people to write down a 'lost opportunity' and give some information about the circumstances and place in which it happened. A LOLO might be something trivial, like a clever response that you wish you had thought of at the time; or something stronger, like failing to deal with a bully, grieving at a loss or struggling to face the realities of climate change. The project was particularly open to those moments - however banal - which somehow become difficult to shake off, that take up much more space thean they deserve, in the mind.
Each LOLO is then shared with another person, who is asked to create a ritual for you to perform, that can cleanse away the anxiety and rid you of problematic memory.
LOLO restricts the making of ritual actions to paper -which can be shaped, folded, drawn on in a multitude of ways - and found objects. Rituals are recorded through photographs (honouring each person's anonymity) and then shared, preferably together with a communal meal.
C-type photographs, paper map.
A deeply personal project that combines photographs into a 'map' to explore childhood experiences of family and place; starting from a long discomfort with the countryside.
C-type photographs, found chest of drawers.
Using photography in combination with domestic furniture to draw out submerged experiences of early childhood,
