I have three large-scale sculptures (2m high by 2.4-3m wide by 20cm deep)and draft 20 min video, that emerged when my independent research collided with the building I am resident in.
The sculptures are made of hand-cut polystyrene and hand-cut plywood, and the shapes are taken from stills of a performance video.
During the slow moving limbo period of early 2021…
My representations of women in situations of emotional friction collided with the long-abandoned office block of Greenwich Council & HMRC, the Adult Services sign still hanging in the corridor…
The sculptures listen in, like symbols from the rest room doors that have grown huge. A chorus with an opinion, like in many offices.
Meanwhile I participate in a support group for Neurodivergent women being failed by the health-care system around their/our diagnosis. Mad, angry, women in private-trying their hardest not to leek out elsewhere or at each other. DWP via the new ‘excited about her new job’ lady from Universal Credit call me each week to ‘check in’.
The resulting body of ideas ‘Social Experiments’ is about fraught support and the three large sculptures anchor the action.
Shared informally to a small group through SET Woolwich Open Studios, this work is ready to be fully developed for a wider audience and to exist outside of the building it was made in.
I want to take five days of the fee to work on re-configuring and developing the work, including the filmed elements, and using (theatre) lighting to explore how this intimate conversation could be mapped onto a new space, and made immersive for the audience to ‘walk in on’,. With the sculptures there centre stage as the ‘chorus’.
The remaining two days would cover install & de-rig. The production budget would enable me to work with video wall and other non-projection based elements that are financially out of reach, and cover transport for the existing work (high top sprinter/Luton van).
Institutional support at this time, my first major body of work since I made a new departure, would be transformative in terms of the criticality and production values of my work. It would also elevate my practice far beyond what is possible DIY.
I am particularly interested in developing an event with Eastside Projects, which could be a performance with Marta Valverde, who features in the film material. And/or something participatory with the public to do with the process I use to generate motifs (in any media), which involves micro-narratives and is borrowed from German Dance-Theatre I can speak more about my process at interview (or see statement).
Step Changes…
To move from the work being site-specific, to using a site as a ‘text’ to generate content that can then exists untethered and reach a wider audience inside an art space.
To move from making fragments representing experiences of interpersonal dynamics, to piecing these together to form a bigger entity - figuring out the new puzzle of story/ narrative that working in this way has proposed.
A large part of my sculptural body of work has been completed by the exhibition space, often non-gallery, outdoors or in abandoned buildings and as such has remained quite ‘fringe’. Up until now, performance work has been a separate strand existing mainly on screen. My ambition for this work is to build my profile with my first exhibition in a significant institutional space since I relaunched my practice in 2016, and to take my work to an arts interested gallery going audience with a high proportion of artists and art lovers in Birmingham.
I make sculpture, room-filling installation, videos and performance.
My work is medium-large scale, sometimes collaborative and often outside the gallery from a ruined Cornish copper mine, to a carpark on a half demolished estate in London. I am interested the body, and within that psychology and interactions, and places.
Recent projects include: SET Free Studio Prize, a year-long residency in a re-purposed building in Woolwich; Recreational Grounds IV, London; Scaffold Gallery’s There is No Such Thing as Boredom, Paradise Works, Manchester; i.e.a.o.u/ SHELF at Old Spanish City, Newcastle; and LCN Showcase SPACE, London.
I was commissioned by Metal Southend to make a new outdoor work for Village Green, Artists Village through a CultureLab residency in 2016; have been a recipient of artist development support from A-N and Jerwood Arts/ Sadler’s Wells; and have been funded by Arts Council England. I studied Fine Art at Falmouth University and Dance Performance Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. On graduation I was awarded a solo show at ArtSway, and was mentored by Ruth Claxton. I established the Visual Arts Commissioning Programme at Green Man music festival in 2016 which is now in its ninth year, and I coach other artists.