London is a pulsing, racing bustling, HUNGRY city and a melting hotpot of culture, character and commotion. I love the awake, alert, drama of London and Shoreditch more particularly. Anything goes here. The rules are for establishing. It's constantly in flux, moving, changing, shifting, thriving and humming with activity.
It's gritty, urban with pockets of wild. I love the chance gestures and random occurrences this environment offers up. So when the opportunity to exhibit at CnB Gallery arose I was immediately engaged.
Shoreditch is the epitome of my artistic interest, practice and approach:
UNTAMED, UNEXPECTED, SURREAL, AVANT GARDE, DISTINCTIVE, RIOTOUS, ESCAPE & PAUSE.
They say if you live In Your heart you are always at home, and my heart resides here in many ways.
London life is far from still, that's perhaps why I try to capture moments that hold your attention, pause is a fundamental to absorbing things, ideas, concepts.
The atmosphere here encourages creativity
The environment supports creative.
My practice
As an explorer and storyteller, I hunt out magic and pause. How instinctive and involuntary it is. You can find it anywhere you seek it. I look for and look to create something disruptive, arousing, otherworldly, engaging the sublime and the beautiful, surreal and visceral.
I'm utterly fascinated by the anatomy of things, not least London Shoreditch, the inhabitants, nature itself. What it is to be human and alive.
The exhibition
I'm mesmerised by patterns, repetition, and habits; in nature, behaviour and sequences in maths. Its hypnotic. I see negative space as much as the positive juxtaposition.
The jostling salmon tide or stream suspended overhead, bisecting the gallery, is plotted to the Fibonacci sequence, underpinned by my fascination with patterns, nature, design and mathematics. As a tide of waves, rather than a spiral, it follows the capillary sequence. Whilst caught still, frozen in time, the pattern inherently moves.
The impossible hill of luggage sets the scene for a picnic atop. It's precarious, as life, like a rickety staircase, it seems to hang there like a stack of cards about to fall. And yet has a permanence and anchorage in time. It suggests travel and the shifting sands of time, it harks back to a time bygone in many ways, as all reflections are. It represents our memories, experiences and sentimentality. Our nostalgia. It speaks to embarking on momentous occasion, leaving home, university, weddings, holidays, moving house, great adventure. The transition of leaves talk of the seasons, the changing nature of things. The ageing process, maturing and improving before the final summit.
I find great inspiration in the exotic and the everyday, in fact I like to celebrate the everyday as if it were exotic, as a storyteller I create heroes or protagonists from the everyday
Take the humble aubergine, I find great beauty, humour and reflection in its character and like to present or re-present him to the world as a moment of pause, something worth contemplating. Most people may consider it purely food, a resource or commodity to eat, but I take more pleasure in considering its character, personality and qualities, it's smooth uninterrupted oil like pigments, it's peculiar asymmetry, it's synaesthesia for example, you can taste it long before you eat it.
IMAGINATION AND INVENTION MAKES THINGS VISIBLE
All the heroes cast around the room make up the key protagonists to my stories. They are part life drawing, observation and part imagination and invention. Perhaps the colours are skewed or the limbs accentuated to acknowledge the variation nature throws up. To bestow my own influence and interpretation, resisting pure observational drawing. My tutor used to despair with me in life drawing, 'draw what's in front of you' she would blast, and she was right, to a point, it's an important skillset to look and really see, one I've drawn on again and again. But so is breaking the rules, departing from the truth, imagining another reality, one where hawks carry cats off into the skies, where animated things are suspended mid air. A place where houseflies are regimented in sequence, order and uniform. A world that immediately encapsulates and ignores nature; bends fact and borrows from fiction, where anything goes. A world that throws expectation, calls it into question. A space where you confront things that might horrify, frighten or confound you but equally, delight, warm and make perfect sense.
The sanctuary is a secular space for contemplation, awe wonder pause and reflection. It heralds a holy trinity, 7 knolls ( a godly number ) household totems, a pew and kneelers for pause, meditation and prayer. It represents our deep-seated need for omnipotence, something to revere, a space to be still, a place to unite without the complication and judgement of religions. A place for gathering, common interest, a place where the everyday and the exotic collide. The perfect union of nature and object.
Nature the finest author, also has huge significance for me, it's imperfections alongside its mesmerising perfection.
I love the unexpected, surprise, especially if it's revealed on closer inspection, the bejewelled glinting wings of house flies on the pew cushions, the tiny tarantula hawk insects that look like delicate floral petals cascading down, the prisms of tessellating crane fly faceted like diamonds. The grasshoppers arranged like ears of corn. The unexpected context and application. Bringing The outside inside. Equally the unexpected, unapologetic impact of Scorpion Hawk squadrons, giant anatomical organs and personified vegetable ensembles.
The conflict of beauty and the grotesque presiding/coinciding simultaneously recurs throughout the exhibition and my practice.
The elephant in the room.
The matter of the heart:
This heart is made up of geometric patterns I've developed which express both the infinite order and chaos the intricacies of blood vessels and magnified blood platelets
The relief is made up of interior haberdashery from stately homes to regular houses, curtain tie backs and cushion fringes.
The anatomy of the heart, a symbol of love and beauty, a life giving force, and yet an abject, quite gruesome, apparatus, something which belongs on the inside of us, something bloody and messy and intricate and delicate, vulnerable and the seat or projection of the greatest emotion. Our driving force, it's slightly grotesque in form perfect in function, it sustains life itself. This sculpture was a real labour of love.
I'm also exhaustively interested in scale and proportion of the minuscule and magnificent, and playing with that order. The sublime scale of this giant bagpipe forces a confrontation, larger than life. It floods the room that barely contains it. It's poised between beats, still, but by the nature of its surface and human qualities it moves. It's almost musical, as an instrument.
