January 2014
Recently I have been developing my life drawing portfolio. I remain very interested in the human condition and how we interact with the world around us.
I have also become very interested in the portrayal of women and exploration of this for myself, as a woman.
June 2010
My sculpture arose from a personal interest in the human psyche and mental health. The work I have created is physically constructed from wood and wire frames with the use of fabric stuffing, second hand clothing, one or two accessories and wax. A significant amount of consideration went into the positioning, styling and finishing of these pieces.
My original interests lie in looking at the negative human emotions such as fear and depression. I was and am concerned with the subtle divide between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’; what it is that pushes a person from unhappiness to clinical depression for example.
I became very interested in the impact my work has in a social situation. I feel that the work has, perhaps without intention, become very much about the social context and human reaction to one another and the environment. Recognition of common human need and empathy has become apparent amongst the observing public. I have always considered successful work to be the kind that creates a reaction, whether it is positive or negative. I was as a result very pleased to see that these sculptures receive a reaction in general from their audience.
The pieces themselves may well be an obstruction, an inconvenience even, which in effect highlights not only the issues that I was myself interested in, but also other issues which are often considered an inconvenience or a hindrance such as homelessness and the dilemma of providing refuge for foreign communities.
A topic which I touched on in my contextual proposition was the fact that the human mind is inclined to see the figure in every configuration and in everything we look at (a face in the moon would be an obvious example). I find this idea fascinating and it was also through considering this that I came to my final realisation of this work. These finished pieces have at times, even when uncompleted, misled a number of people including myself (!) into thinking there was somebody else there. It is interesting that the human imagination likes to jump to conclusions about a situation, often with negative feeling overpowering positive, in that we are much more inclined to be startled and then have a negative response than have a positive one, perhaps due to western ‘horror’ culture.
The common thread between the sculptures and where the initial ideas came from, is my personal interest in disorders within the Autistic spectrum. I am very interested in the way we communicate and react to and with one another, and in any difficulties we may have in doing so. The most recent work arose specifically from exploring ideas around such difficulties and has then developed due to other influences. I hope that you can at least get a sense of this in the result.
