Welcome to my new website
Hello, thanks for visiting my new website, I hope that you find something that intrigues you. My aspiration is that there is something for everyone to engage with depending on their own interests, be that in photographs, alchemical reactions or more abstract imagery.
Getting to this point has been a mammoth task, my last website went live nearly four years ago and since that point so much has happened; with my solo show at ThirtyFiveGamble in 2017 acting as a catalyst for how I understand and articulate my practice. Since then, I have found a studio on a farm East of Nottingham that gives me space to breathe as well as starting an MFA at Nottingham Trent University.
I have committed significant thinking in the last year to how I define myself and what drives me to create new work. The pandemic has relieved some of the pressures of working within the art world - creating new work, showing new work, responding to feedback, ad infinitum.
I made the decision midway through 2020 to spend time focussing on making and attempting to connect the different outcomes I create. This was helped along by an experiment that fused photographic processes with alchemical reactions that I find in the petri latex series, the resulting work, the Abstracted 35 series, showed that my approach and the marks I seek can be articulated in different ways.
During this process I have tried to find a framework to explain my practice which went through several updates and adjustments before I settled on material and interaction, there were times it felt like I might be over complicating so being able to frame with just two words feels like an achievement and also ‘right’.
The material is the thing that drives me, a curiosity leading me to engage with a material to see what might be created, this is often experimental with me finding a path to navigate along. My definition of material is much broader than I expected incorporating mediums, chemicals, defined processes, digital, drawing, photography, and words. This framework has made it easier for me to find connections, some direct and others abstract, amongst the different materials I use.
The interactions create ways for me to engage my practice with different audiences, the materials creating space for conversations to happen, to find space and time for pause and reflection. This is common in all the interactions, I aim to provide a moment where someone can step away from the everyday for even just a moment, to ponder, be that in an engagement with colour and form, or by finding something in one of the sanctuaries that speaks to them.
Over the coming months I hope to continue the journey, to find a sense of order that enables me to experiment, to question and to engage with different people in different ways. Watch this space as I attempt to fulfil my promise to blog more!