Description

My work is about creating a pictorial language that uses illusionism and artifice to question value, hierarchy and notions of identity, specifically gender. In referencing the traditional language of sculpture I am interested in exploring the role of the sculptural object and its relationship to the viewer.

The act of making is fundamental to my practice. I like to fetishise materials to the point where they become overloaded with colour and surface, making them distracting and highly theatrical. This is combined with materials that have a low-fi quality, such as duct tape and plastic bags, giving the appearance of materials being literally ‘thrown together’, adding a DIY quality to the work.

This visual device employs the concept of the masquerade, the notion of concealing something for a pleasurable purpose. Rachel Harrison’s work can be read in a similar way, as Gilles Deleuze writes “simulation designates the power to produce an effect (…) it is in the sense of ‘costume’, or even better, of masks, expressing a process of disguise where, behind each mask there is still another”.

The juxtaposition of order, process and immediacy disrupts the formal hierarchy of the work and attempts to create a visual discord that plays on the viewer’s aesthetic sensibility.

Humour is integral to the work. Sexual innuendo and the notion of the ridiculous is a necessary tool in order to question the role and identity of objects. By playing around with monumentality and scale I’m trying to subvert notions of sculptural legacy and conventional ways of reading art. I consider my work to function as props within our world of consumerism, popular culture and its fetishisation of objects.