My artistic practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, mask-making, video and performance. This year has given birth to a bizarre family of masked creatures, that I use to investigate human action and motivation. The world I am building draws equally from folk vernacular, art history, and contemporary influences. Recently I have become interested in scapegoat rituals stemming from research into William Holman Hunt’s painting ‘The Scapegoat’. I have based a body of work around my own fictionalised narrative collaged together from biblical and Ancient Greek accounts of scapegoats. I am interested in what historical stories, rituals and folklore can tell us about 'humanness' and relate to contemporary society.
As a response to current restrictions preventing us from showing work in conventional spaces, I made characters from my paintings get up and walk around, in the mask-making aspect of my practice. Documentation of the narrative performances can be seen in the three video instalments of ‘Scapegoat’. The connection between my subject matter and materiality investigates a state of being ‘cast out’ often using found objects alongside ‘found stories’. I think of myself as a magpie picking up fragments of narrative and bits of old wood off the street and bringing them back to my practice.
