I strive to produce artwork that is both physically and intellectually accessible to all. With a strong sustainability ethos and sensitivity to the surroundings where my art practice is constructed and exhibited, I produce sculptures and installations using everyday objects and recycled materials, seldom measuring anything, preferring to allow structures to form organically. Through gathering, deconstructing, and assembling I am constantly exploring the material qualities of objects and structures, their histories and how they relate to personal or social beliefs. How we remember and are remembered is integral to my work. Exploring the complexity of individual and shared memories, respectfully combining the past with the present to produce experiential and tangible work.
The Mark Astaire Prize 2024
Runner up
‘Consider Your Source’
This sculptural form was encapsulated in a two-foot by one-foot fish tank. Constructed from over twenty thousand Origami boats made from politically conflicting newspapers, the boats represent the statistics used to write news articles or political rhetoric regarding the number of people crossing the English Channel on small boats.
Each boat is a person, a life used at times to push political agendas.
Selected for
The Scottish Landscape Awards Exhibition 2023/24
‘Paper Round’ (2023) is a sculptural installation that explores the relationship between the traditional paper round, where a child delivers news stories by weaving through an urban landscape on foot, posting a physical hard copy through postboxes and the increasingly common method of accessing online news that snakes its way up walls and through buildings into the wider community and beyond. The frame from a child’s toy supports long strips of printed newspaper and headlines, draped over and stretching beyond the house shape. The shadows cast by the straight, carefully positioned news stories climb the walls and surround the small building, engulfing the map to which the wendy-house is anchored. The shadows and physical structures merge, blurring the past with the present highlighting today’s constant bombardment of online news.
The Scottish Landscape Awards exhibition was held at the City Art Centre Edinburgh from
Saturday 4 November 2023 to Saturday 3 March 2024
Sustainability Exploring using natural or repurposed materials allows structures to become part of their surroundings. Often, more importance is placed on allowing nature to reclaim finished artwork, and many pieces of work undergo a stage of metamorphosis before being consumed by their surroundings.
‘A Shadow from Our Past’(2021) presents an image made from the residue of the decomposition of gathered dead bees onto a block of wood. This artwork attempts to highlight the effect climate change and disease can have on colonies of bees and asks the question - in the future, will all that is left of colonies of honey bees be a shadowy residue?
‘Part of Us’( 2021) was inspired by The Matter of Trust Clean Wave Project, which produces hair mats by felting together human hair and pet fur to soak up oil spills in oceans. The sculptures invite the viewer to consider their own environmental footprint by presenting an everyday object: a pair of boots made from human hair perched on top of an upturned empty fuel can. Balls of human hair trapped within netting are designed to slowly soak up oil in jars exhibited alongside the sculptural footwear.
‘The Turbulent Journey of Misinformation’ is a physical manifestation of manipulated statistics. A project that started in the Spring of 2023 and developed into ‘Consider Your Source ’ in Spring of 2024. Every effort was taken to use all printed newspapers on general sale within Scotland, thus encapsulating conflicting politics and points of view into one sculptural form.
Snow and Ice
The temporary and plasticity characteristics of ice and snow provide an opportunity to create work that changes over a short period of time, allowing an audience to see many different versions of the structure before they disintegrate or disappear. In the work ‘Distorted Memories,’ a series of photographs of old family slides are projected onto snow, expressing the unreliability of memory and giving the images a fragmented and distorted representation of a fading past. The respectful, slow, and methodic freezing of work materials temporarily stabilised the memory of a father and his carpentry skills in the sculptural installation, ‘Storage Capacity Full’.
Scottish society's expectations for working-class young men and women in the 1950s are expressed in the sculpture ‘The Homebuilder and The Homemaker’ (2023). The structural forms of everyday tools represent the traditional roles of heterosexual men and women.
Community Projects and Bespoke Workshops
With over twenty years of experience working with community groups, schools, nurseries and individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds and abilities, I welcome the prospect of planning and facilitating bespoke workshops.
Please use the form below to enquire about activities for your group.
