PRACTICE SUMMARY

I use a range of mediums within my practice: drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and installation. At times my work has followed disparate tangents. However, my major projects to date share common concepts and investigations.

These projects have usually been object-based installations. Sometimes they explore the effect of light (day light and electrical) through an array of translucent materials. At the same time they form a dialogue with the architectural space in which the works are housed.

On occasions, I’ve used light to reference change and the passing of time. For instance, I’ve worked with light from an outside space which results in the work having night, dusk, day, and dawn aspects where the most rapid change over time is noticed at the juncture of day and night The amorphous quality of this work strongly relies on the light through the window as the transition of the day produces these subtle changes. Such elements reinforce the sense of the ethereal and the transformative, and these qualities drift into the phenomenological sensibilities of the viewer.

Other times I have used light to reference science and the man-made within a theme… be it the toxic effects of pollution, the way light might be used to grow things artificially, or how a slide of organic matter is illuminated for microscopy. This can be seen in my Cyber Plant sculptures. They represent plant forms through fluorescent light in an exploration of science fiction within an ecological context… In the future we may come home from work at the end of the day and turn our plants on… pulsing with energy as if they had been transformed from toxic pollution.

Whilst the use of light has formed a large part of my work, it is not a permanent factor as I veer into different mediums (photography, drawing and painting). Rather, conceptual ideas based on ecology and overlapping concerns with art and science underlie the majority of my projects. Points of reference for the physical form in which my work takes stems from looking at basic structural compositions of living things, their growth and transformation. Patterns, structures, and fragments are sifted from the natural world and recombined. Botanical illustration, microscopy, genetic engineering, and the laboratory aesthetic have been some themes fueling these explorations to date.