UNCANNY OBJECTS

This body of work takes impressions from ‘negative’ and ‘in between’ spaces to make material our experience of the unknown. Through ideas of the uncanny and unknowable these small scale sculptures are a material investigation into the intense uncertainties engendered by the profound, and sometimes chaotic, social, cultural and psychological changes brought about by lockdown and the global pandemic, and the shrinking of our world to our immediate lockdown spaces during stay at home orders. I have collected material traces of this experience to use as raw material for a series of indexical ‘casts’, that sit uneasily alongside investigations of architectural ideas of ‘home’; and the dissonance inherent in ‘virtual’ screen based interaction.

This project extends my interest in the way the climate crisis of the anthropocene (and its contribution to the emergence of new life threatening viruses across species, such as corona viruses) forms an at times incomprehensible backdrop to our daily lives, and frames our decision making, as well as our sense of self.

Inheritance 2020

This exhibition is the culmination of my recent sculptural experiments with found objects, industrial detritus and building materials. My project re-works burnt timber, fence posts, car bonnets, signage etc to reflect on our over-consumption and exploitation of natural resources; our relentless impact on our environment; and who we are when un/conscious of this destructive excess. The sculptures are part memorial gesture part provocation: a work of mourning and an attempt to visualise and convey the reality of this destruction through cultural forms.

This body of work is also a personal meditation on alienation and identity in the context of social and cultural meanings for nature, denial of the climate crisis, and the impossibility of unmediated intimate experiences of both the natural world and sense of self.

 

Digital disorder: mind games, minds & games

The romance of the digital revolution since the 80s has been fed by a rhetoric of accessibility and democracy, whilst simultaneously generating and critiquing our surveillance state dystopias. Yet another iteration of boys with toys. My research project transposes the mythic real/virtual hierarchy to itemise the impact of our digital manipulation.

‘we are all fascists now’

This project explores social and political subjection. Titled ‘we are all fascists now’ the work is a response to the post-S11, post-economic crises, austerity and nationalist driven world in the context of global flows of technology, money and culture.

It is a reflection on the everyday and the individual as a way of examining the insidious operations of power to which we are all subjected. Inspired by Foucault’s theories of micro-fascism – that we are all conditioned to exercise a fascist impulse in our interactions with others; that we will lay claim to power if we can; and indeed be played by it and by the mechanisms which generate those operations – this new work references our subconscious or automatic responses to explore some of the conditions for social interaction.

Is art perhaps the last form of social critique when democratic governments criminalise historical forms of protest? Or is that the realm of comedy?

 

The Big House

Another long term research project is a comparative analysis of contemporary prison industries; the concentration camps of World War II; and the history of Missions in colonial Australia.