I am a mixed media artist working with photography and paint. My practice explores intimacy of place, and how our identity is reflected in and built by our surroundings.
I am a mixed media artist working with photography and paint. My practice explores intimacy of place, and how our identity is reflected in and built by our surroundings.
“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives….each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”
– Annie Dillard
My degree show in its totality showcases over 300 blocks which feature a moment in time, photographed then transformed into a tangible object. This is done by pasting the photo onto MDF board, then painting the sides of the MDF by hand to match the image. The back of the blocks display the exact time and coordinates of where the image was taken. The blocks explore the idea that the structures/environment around me, whether I notice it or not, is key in the construction of who I am.
The intention behind the creation of the blocks is to take small, mundane moments in everyday life and give them the care and attention I believe they deserve. I have been collecting photographs for over five years, the images acting as punctuation in my everyday life. I take photos in the fleeting, quiet moments, which are often overlooked in our fast-paced and distracted day-to-day lives. The photos are based on a system I’ve been unknowingly building through my collection of these images – hundreds of photos which include vanishing points (or the implication of a vanishing point). To me, the vanishing points you will notice in many of the blocks are representative of an implied onward motion, a journey through the world as I transition from child to adult, location to location, day to day. The images are an embodiment of the in-between, the space between what was and what will be, sometimes described as “liminal space”. The exploration of this liminal space is an attempt to come home to myself. Though each day may feel the same, and some days I now hold little to no recollection of, I believe each snapshot is a glance into the construction of my identity and the same can be said of my audience and each of their own personal, mundane moments with the world in which they reside.
Each block takes hours of my time to create, pasting my photographs onto MDF, then using gouache paint to colour-match and extend the image. By spending considerable time to produce the block, I feel as though the creation is an act of respect for the moment captured in the image, even though it may have originally felt insignificant. I spend time with each snapshot, and therefore I feel deeply involved in snippets of my life that would otherwise come and go with very little thought. My practice is my attempt as an artist to bridge the gap between myself and feeling disconnected with my own life and making this feeling known to my audience. In a way, my work is founded on a deep-rooted sense of feeling lost in a world of structure. These universal structures can be recognised in schedules, routines, and physical structures (buildings and streets) and this is conveyed through the uniform and obsessive building blocks I display in my degree show. My practice attempts to make sense of these figurative and literal structures around us in relation to how the intricacies of our lives are manifested in the spaces we inhabit.
The system is formed of the following criteria for creating each block:
