I began sewing because I was too fast at painting, it would be all over before I had really delved into what I was doing. It was in this frustration that I found embroidery, it was impossibly slow and in its nature required total immersion and the labour of hours of thought. The epic hours.
I used to be very prescribed, always having a distinct vision of what the end result of a piece would be, but a mixture of things changed that, residencies mostly, opening myself up to being inspired by circumstance and people. Making mistakes along the way and actually learning something (and not dying - though sometimes it felt close). I am much more into working organically now, because art imitates life in so many ways and life just doesn’t fit into a box.
I have been sewing portraits for a long time, ever fascinated by people and their sometimes incredibly unique and often mundane stories, the contrast working in absolute tandem. I am aware of the elbowing out of contemporary art portraiture receives, but I am also attracted to things that are excluded, the urge to repair, to lift up, to shine a new light on, is a natural reflex that plays out in my life and my work. Which often leaves me in limbo between two worlds, which is equally a discomfort as a drive.
I began to sew people on found mattresses to give a corporeal and spiritual sense of their history and tried to put them in emotive situations to capture one moment of their lives in an almost, albeit abstract, diagrammatic way. As time would go by and I began travelling overseas for shows, dismantling sculptures for ease of travel, it was frustrating because they would get damaged and limited. I realised I could use this to my advantage and that they could become new sculptures, based on their new weaknesses and strengths. It was exciting and strangely, or not so strangely, a lot of the new situations the embroideries would find themselves in would have a direct link to the situations of the real models. Though the embroidery would get worn and torn, it seemed to add weight to the essence of the journeys they had been on. I will never forget when I was in a market shopping for jewels for Cordelia’s tears and she phoned me up and immediately burst into tears, or when she got covered in soot, due to oil lamp lighting, from an outdoor exhibition in the Mexican Si’an Kaan National Park and so I gave her a bath and it looked like she had drowned, the week after she told me she had split up from her long term boyfriend and had been immersed in a profoundly deep sadness, or the time I photographed Grace and Tom for a piece called 'Fusion' the day before Grace found out she was pregnant.
More recently I have been working on tulle, its translucency offering the possibility of constant evolution and collaboration both choreographed and natural, with its surroundings. I have been making small films which explore this idea and performances that create a seamlessness between myself and the creation of the work. I think a lot about the space between 2D and 3D, somewhere or back and forth in between screen and flesh, the written word and the object, which is a virtual comment on how we communicate in this time. It was this space that first attracted me to embroidery, the way it swelled off the page so generously, willing itself into 3D.
I am excited to invite more collaboration into my practice and put the ideas and playfulness I have been experimenting with into much bigger projects, as though I have been preparing for some time to wriggle out of a skin, bigger, shinier and ready.
I used to be very prescribed, always having a distinct vision of what the end result of a piece would be, but a mixture of things changed that, residencies mostly, opening myself up to being inspired by circumstance and people. Making mistakes along the way and actually learning something (and not dying - though sometimes it felt close). I am much more into working organically now, because art imitates life in so many ways and life just doesn’t fit into a box.
I have been sewing portraits for a long time, ever fascinated by people and their sometimes incredibly unique and often mundane stories, the contrast working in absolute tandem. I am aware of the elbowing out of contemporary art portraiture receives, but I am also attracted to things that are excluded, the urge to repair, to lift up, to shine a new light on, is a natural reflex that plays out in my life and my work. Which often leaves me in limbo between two worlds, which is equally a discomfort as a drive.
I began to sew people on found mattresses to give a corporeal and spiritual sense of their history and tried to put them in emotive situations to capture one moment of their lives in an almost, albeit abstract, diagrammatic way. As time would go by and I began travelling overseas for shows, dismantling sculptures for ease of travel, it was frustrating because they would get damaged and limited. I realised I could use this to my advantage and that they could become new sculptures, based on their new weaknesses and strengths. It was exciting and strangely, or not so strangely, a lot of the new situations the embroideries would find themselves in would have a direct link to the situations of the real models. Though the embroidery would get worn and torn, it seemed to add weight to the essence of the journeys they had been on. I will never forget when I was in a market shopping for jewels for Cordelia’s tears and she phoned me up and immediately burst into tears, or when she got covered in soot, due to oil lamp lighting, from an outdoor exhibition in the Mexican Si’an Kaan National Park and so I gave her a bath and it looked like she had drowned, the week after she told me she had split up from her long term boyfriend and had been immersed in a profoundly deep sadness, or the time I photographed Grace and Tom for a piece called 'Fusion' the day before Grace found out she was pregnant.
More recently I have been working on tulle, its translucency offering the possibility of constant evolution and collaboration both choreographed and natural, with its surroundings. I have been making small films which explore this idea and performances that create a seamlessness between myself and the creation of the work. I think a lot about the space between 2D and 3D, somewhere or back and forth in between screen and flesh, the written word and the object, which is a virtual comment on how we communicate in this time. It was this space that first attracted me to embroidery, the way it swelled off the page so generously, willing itself into 3D.
I am excited to invite more collaboration into my practice and put the ideas and playfulness I have been experimenting with into much bigger projects, as though I have been preparing for some time to wriggle out of a skin, bigger, shinier and ready.
