A physical approach
A slow process of an ever growing bubbling recipe of ideas
A growth of ideas,
Cooking of ideas, It’s a collaboration of ingredients.
Gathering, sourcing, and identifying are the ingredients of a recipe of actions combined with a speculative approach, allowing me to discover of what our surroundings can create.
Through intimacy with the outdoors, and a physical involvement in nurturing and managing
allowed the idea of the ‘cultivator’ to arise. This suggestion is an important procedure; gathering from the garden, detaching a petal from a flower, digging a vegetable from the ground - these gathered elements are then organised and combined, as though I was a cook, of sorts.
Cooking together a number of natural pigments sourced from the landscape, dyeing fabrics to form recipes of colour, scent and pattern, boiling, steaming and pressing organic material allows the pigment to bleed onto and into the fabric - which sometimes fights the pigment that already embedded into the surface. The manmade and natural create a tension; they become deadly looking, and appear to be skin like. I think of these works as having souls. A combination of actions reflecting the human presence such as tying, rolling, arranging, sorting and moving around.
Physically composing these elements, with an emphasis on the life of fabric inspires the creation of these sculptural paintings. Through giving shape and structure, these become ‘beings’ interacting within a space. The figurative becomes present.
This interaction allows these ‘beings’ to have a conversation between the structural and painterly - the entropy of the organic. Certain elements of making are reflected in the arrangements. A figure or skin is present, theatrically talking, or perhaps in a condition of awareness. The display of these works becomes richer and more dramatic, creating a conversation between life & death.
It’s all a physical involvement in creating a space. Time spent placing.