Location: United Kingdom
Treating line as object, I create artworks that blur boundaries between sculpture, drawing and installation - hybrids that extend line from plane as 3d form. At the root of my practice is the notion of interconnectedness throughout nature, energy, life’s cyclical persistence and transformation. I’m interested in tentacularity - ‘life lived along lines... a series of interlaced trails’ (Donna Haraway, 2016).
Materiality and process are central - the work is hand-made and labour-intensive. My use of recycled and found materials (industrial and organic) relates to our relationship with matter, nature, and ourselves. Collecting objects and materials is intrinsic to the process - material as message.
Increasingly, environmental concerns about human exploitation of nature and over-consumption inform the content. My recent approach had been a form of suturing, a cathartic attempt to repair in response to world destruction.
In 2020 I won the Red Line Art Works Award for my environmental sculptural installations Snakes and Ladders, Glut and Accretion. In 2019, I won a Royal Society of Sculptors Gilbert Bayes Award culminating in RSS GBA Winners exhibition, London & becoming a Member of RSS. Other awards include an Environmental Award, Devon Recycled Sculpture Trail, 2014; Atkinson Gallery Summer Show prize 2011 and David Shepherd’s 3d Wildlife Artist of the Year 2009. I was highly commended for my the Green Capital Residency work for Big Green Week, Create Centre & Arnolfini, Bristol, 2012.
In 2019 I co-curated and featured in Arts Council England-funded B-Wing, Shepton Mallet Prison, Somerset, UK, a site-responsive project with 8 artists/writers & community events. Artworks were exhibited in the prison as an immersive experience. Snakes and Ladders interacted with the space across 3 floors.
I gained an MFA from Bath Spa University in 2018. The same year I was selected for Ingruttati Palermo, Manifesta12, Italy. My work Gift of Water was a performative piece documented on film. In 2016 I created a handwoven canopy focal piece, for Sarah Eberle’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show garden, which won gold/best artisan garden.
Social engagement is a part of my practice. I teach & curate community art projects in unexpected places. I curated step in stone in 2015, funded by ACE. Multidisciplinary artscapes in Mendip quarries by 14 international artists/poets/musicians linked culture, environment and community. The project involved 6 venues.
During lockdown this year, I developed a project Life in the Undergrowth, for which I received an ACE Emergency Response fund. Inspired by small hidden worlds in my garden that often get overlooked, it became a circular process - garden feeding art and art feeding garden. In isolation I've improved my digital skills and have made a film Life in the Undergrowth.
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