Biografia
My interest in ruins and objects started when I was very young, my Nan used to live in front of the old cotton mills in Lancashire, and as a group we would explore, forage and play in and around them. I found them fascinating, these huge buildings and derelict towers with hundreds of small windows full of old machinery, bird’s nests and detritus, imagining the histories of the people who used to live there whether real or fantasy. I have gone back to my passions of art after a period of time raising my family. This has more than fueled my passions, for the cultural and environmental world around us, which I wish to explore and draw people’s attention to through my artistic processes.
The work I create is centered on the found object and ruins exploring their purpose in time, and the connections we associate with objects. By manipulating, disrupting and reevaluating the potentials, and examining the creative and destructive drive within juxtaposing facts and fictions through sculpture, photography, tableau and installation. Through this process I am examining deeper-rooted contemporary issues of industry and the social history within the meaning of the object and the work that is created.
For Marx “Only when an object is consumed does it shed its material nature and become a product.” When this object is discarded and becomes ruin, does it then take on its previous material being, become something new, or carry the burden of a history it acquired through time? It’s these questions I intend to explore though my work.
An influential artist within my practice is Anselm Kiefer, his pieces create a narrative through both the readymade object and his collection of found materials, with these he creates work that translates meanings with historical and political content as in his ‘Women of Antiquity’. Along with Mona Hatoum her piece ‘Homebound’ a tableau of objects draws attention to the domestic and a hidden anxiety within a ‘typical’ female environment. Both these artists create work that is raising issues that are both relevant to history and present day.
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