ARTISTS TALKING

My work attempts to expose the relationships between human and natural landscapes.

Most of my professional training has taken place in the UK – graduating from the RCA, London in 1998 – as has the majority of my recent work. This has introduced me to other landscapes, encouraging a broad outlook to my response to specific places and an understanding of the importance of research for the successful development of my work.

I aim to develop profound works which resonate with the particular place, interior or external. This stimulates me to develop new methods using unusual materials which are linked to the specific environment (eg butter, fish skins, trees, fir cones and watercress) rather than relying on established practice and mediums with which I am familiar. New methods and procedures for each work, while challenging and occasionally highly risky, encourage me to propel my ideas forward into new avenues and opportunities, and also offer the opportunity for surprise in myself and, I hope, in the audience.

Underlying all of my practice is an interest in exposing spaces which are not normally encountered. This concern with space, including light, dark, colour, texture and smell, has produced a series of works that explore their symbolic nature and intimacy whilst also attempting to delineate the integral nature of their relationship.

Over the last three years I have produced a range of work through commissions, residencies, fellowships and exhibitions: Who Am I? (ArtSway, New Forest, residency 2000), Sweet Red (Newton Park Suffolk, commission organised by Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery, 2000), ambush (Year of the Artist project in the New Forest, 2000), epidermis (Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship, 2001). These have all built upon the work Re-Evolution (Glasgow School of Art, 1996) for my graduate show where I placed a fifteen-metre-tall Scots Pine tree in the stairwell of the Macintosh building.

In exploring these unencountered spaces I aspire for a resonance with fable or fairy story, a suggestion of promised Arcadias or Utopias which are unattainable, hoping to encourage a sublime experience for the visitor.

UPDATE 2006
Through commissions, residencies and exhibitions I have produced a range of new work, most recently the exhibition 'Time Stands Still (1916 & 1991-2001)', 2006, at Kilmainham Gaol Museum, in Dublin, Ireland and touring to the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Skopje, Macedonia, in November 2006. I am just about to start to start a residency at the Sirius Art Centre in Cobn, Cork in Ireland. I have been commissioned by the Felixstowe Coastal Council to work together with a Sea Defence Scheme and produce a commission for the Felixstowe seafront (this proposal was just accepted and will begin in 2007 or 2008). I participated at ArtSway's New Forest Pavilion, 2005, at the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. My varied artistic practice encompasses work from video installations to major architectural interventions in space, such as ambush, 2000, in the New Forest for YOTA, to sculptural works, such as Who Am I?, 1999 at ArtSway. I have also produced epidermis (made out of salmon skins and bones) during a Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship, 2001, which toured to Fabrica Gallery, Brighton in 2002. I was short-listed with Ambush 2 for the Jerwood Sculpture Prize in 2001, London, commissioned by The Samling Foundation, Road to Nowhere, 2002 in Kielder Forest, Northumberland and Life Cycle 2004 in Knowle West Health Park, Bristol.