What are the main concerns within your practice?
The relationship between image, object and text. It started off as just that, and what my dissertation was about- art as a form of therapy. Now I think I’m being more responsive to the title of the show, So What of Our Future?
My main concerns as an individual and what I represent, are being explored through looking at gay culture and societal issues that have been raised and abused. I’m not trying to establish opinion but by using my staging of a space as a vehicle to realise structures within this specificity that are not being conveyed, not only not to the majority but people in themselves because they’re not realising its an issue. Through a piece of spoken word I want to illustrate this as a performance.
I’ve written quite a long spoken word piece that takes about 10 minutes to perform and the space is going to focus on a illustration with image, object and text. I feel like there needs to be a linguistic thread to cohere things that can be quite misconstrued like objects and images.
What are your biggest influences?
It’s actually probably more writers than painters. I’m not abandoning painting, but I’m focusing less on it as I go on. Novels have the tendency to stage a scene and I particularly like writers who can write about something quite clearly, but have an incessant undertone that can be really belligerent towards the end and become unearthed. But I am very fond of the waves of minimalism and the tendencies that an installation can have – how a visual circle around a performance piece can change it. Max Porter has been a big influence, he wrote the fantastic novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which is the symbolic manifestation of grief in the form of a crow and again, starting to use objects and things to represent emotions – making objects more personable.
What do you like most about the studio?
Being in my own corner and not having to talk to anybody. I like being tucked away. I often come here at 1am when no ones here. I like working when no ones here. I’m a bit of a night owl, even though I’m horrendously afraid of owls.
How has your work changed over the course of your degree?
Massively. When I came in first year, I was really, really obsessed with minimalism – I was really obsessed with white, everything was white. White paintings, white sculptures. It became very clinical. I suddenly added loads of colour into it. I think I’m still finding the balance. My concerns in first year were much more geometric, whereas now I’m moving more into actually conveying messages that I need feel to be conveyed.
What are your plans after graduation?
I’m going to Sydney to write my second novel. Then hopefully going to do a 3 year creative writing course in San Francisco.