This year, due to the pandemic, I returned to my family house in Cornwall which my dad has been self-building; a process that started in 2009. This unexpected move presented unforeseen challenges and led me to adapt, like many other artists, by utilising found objects from home in order to create work.
Responding to this environment, I have collected and incorporated building materials as starting points for constructing assemblages and installations. This has led to a site-specific approach to making and installing; using the unfinished building project as a space to be exhibited in.
I am interested in the re-use and re-purposing of everyday, found and waste materials which are naturally occurring and readily available. Through utilising readymade objects and domestic materials, I aim to explore the importance of process and materiality, experimenting with the defamiliarisation and distortion of familiar, ordinary objects, surfaces and textures. This use of inexpensive, mass-produced materials enables me to sustain a free and speculative approach to making.
Using supposedly mundane, throw away and overlooked waste matter allows for unconstrained experimentation; altering it and exploring its capacity to be scanned, woven, printed, collaged and assembled to create work that often incorporates found colour, text and pattern.
My use of a combination of processes facilitates an intuitive and playful practice that is centred around not knowing. This use of varying approaches means that they often overlap; leading in and out of one another as I enjoy pushing the process and exploring how a piece is altered through different formats, scales and installations. There is subsequently a layering and dualism in contrasting digital and physical elements of my practice.
Finding myself working in this building site context has led to the weaving of prints into the rafters and the assemblage of materials on its unfinished walls. I couldn’t have foreseen that my practice would echo this building project; becoming an equal partner in my work.
