Statement

When I was sixteen we lived in a tall thin house. We got a new rope fire escape and had to practise using it. I put the rope like a noose round my torso and climbed out of the top storey window. One of my brothers was in the room egging me on. My stepmother was there too, killing herself laughing and my other brother was outside trying to look up my skirt. I could see that the rope was loose and I was going to drop several feet before the slack was taken up. I couldn’t get any words out. In the end I had to let go.

The playfulness of language, the multiplicity of meaning within both words and objects, and the possibilities these daily basics afford us, is at the core of my practice. I want to feel sick and excited, on the edge of laughing or crying. Drawing is the ‘in’ for me: it’s the closest to writing and talking without using words - materially adjacent, simple, very little required, intuitive and accessed by most people at an early point in their lives. My tools and impetus for drawing are the man made detritus I find on roadsides and urban and green spaces. Some I draw with directly and some are flattened and enlarged into templates, with which I make repetitive intuitive marks with ink, pen and graphite on found papers. Collecting materials is a regular activity: accessing meaning, suggestion, memory and emotion within objects. My sculptural works and short film collaborations extend the use of these incidental objects, working with human hair and teeth, blankets, furniture and  domestic items, to reflect on human experience, connection and tenderness: the work is always in close proximity to the body. For me, humour is an essential counterbalance to the escalating fear, hatred and power play in wider society and a useful tool for understanding personal experience including gendered imbalance, brain disease, local, family and societal politics and the effort of trying to maintain a thriving art practice.