The Hangmen

Polymer clay, silverleaf, mildsteel, print 2020

Drowning in daisies

Digital Print on textile, 2020

During the pandemic there has been an experience of suspended animation as we step between worlds hovering between a sensory perspective and an online virtual reality. The bats hung in mercurial forms represent the upside down, a moment of reflection and a symbol of sacrifice, of dormancy as we enter a liminal space. The body captured in a 2D digital collage, suspended in a funeral field of daisies as she is held between the body and the flattened cut out pixels. This work is a virtual surrender to this moment.

Green Man

Ancient Deities, Arusha Gallery, Curated by Rhiannon Salisbury, 2020

Please take the gift of seeds and scatter them.

By sowing seeds you are actively protesting for self sufficiency with actions based on local knowledge. Waste is a human concept that does not exist in nature.

Rewilding with indigenous seeds can help address the current food, farming and climate crisis. Local food forests in urban and rural areas can help build natural and long lasting ecosystems that are beneficial for everyone.

Sow an indigenous seed. Alone or with your community, friends, strangers or lovers. Ask about them. Find them. Share them. And try not to sow the same kind twice. Diversify.

This is a message from the face of the greenman.

The green man has proliferated British gardens, a common image found in the decor section of garden centres and at mayday festivities. Usually presented as a sculptural mask surrounded or entirely made from foliage, it is one of the few pagan deities to slip into our collective imagination. The origin is unknown and disparate, but has managed to charm its way into many different histories across the world occurring throughout the ages. A benign character able to communicate with plants, a guardian of this world reminding us that acknowledging the consciousness of trees and plants could give us access to a wider world and awareness of the ecosystem we live in. It is one of the only anthropormisations of vegetation, a forest-god or sorts, an emblem of cycles of birth–death–rebirth and the turning of the seasons within the natural year; a reminder of forces of Nature exist despite human enterprise. There is irony in this emblem of anarchic animism holding currency within Britain where tree cover is among the sparsest in Europe.

Net : Camouflage

Net:Camouflage presents a series of slippery critters perched against digital prints in high saturation. The pixelation fragments and distorts from reality. Form flattened, direction disrupted the frozen shapes merge and re-emerge from the crystallised textures. The project uses pattern and other techniques of digital camouflage to subvert our clarity of vision and recognition through disjointed geometry, reflection and repetition. As the forms disperse amongst the rocky terrain, they refer to the flatness of the screen, the board game, the image and the game space.

In the speed of the digital age, many things slip past us without even our noticing disguised with other information. Surveillance perforates our lives with a multiplicity of facial recognition softwares and data mapping appearing as services whilst commodifying the user. As the rate of change increases, we have to find new ways to decipher the coded world around us. This project presents an animal allegory of distortion, the disarming uncertainty of things hidden in plain sight.

The Wild Things Are

The Wild Things Are is a collection of sculptures whose ambiguous forms and reflective surface present elusive representations of British Woodland creatures. The sculptures are installed in the ancient woodland at Broom Hill Sculpture Gardens in Barnstaple as part of The National Sculpture Prize 2019 hosted there since 2008. The work questions the possible loss of these earthbound creatures in relation to the current acceleration of climate change and huge deforestation occurring all over the globe. These distorted holograms act as ghost of the actual beings, as a description of consciousness which can no longer take a living form. A notion to suggest the desire to become.

Winner of National Sculpture Prize 2019.

I am an astronaut

Moonstone

(inscription: i am an astronaut)

Cement, silverleaf.

2017