I love spaghetti, preferably served with piping hot tomato sauce. I am interested in material narratives, how things can hold stories and how materials are tied up in narrative experience. In as such, the making, the crafting is central to my work. I am invested in dreams and wishful thinking, functionality and feeling like a necessary part of a system – in short I am interested in belonging, how I belong, how we belong, how things belong to a situation. My work is influenced by botany and feminist practices, by stories that are handed down from one generation to the next. I am concerned with questions around getting older, living a good life and the responsibility we take up in respect to ourselves, our friends and families, plants, rocks and pets and all the other things populating our experience of time. The materials I choose, clay, fabric and plants, reference domesticity and often gendered labour. But the size at which I work often exceeds the home and the expected boundary of the supposedly fragile and delicate craft practices I deploy. Enormous ceramics and vast stitching meet text, audio and video and come together in dreamlike, unapologetically romantic installations that are intended to taste like a generous plate of tangled pasta smothered in red.
MY EARS ARE MY EYES
Graduation Project
their ears are their eyes, they hear what they cannot see in the darkness, when they lose their yellow, they cannot hear, they cannot see, when they loose their suns, they grow deaf to the world surrounding them.
This is the story of a yellow flower blossoming at the night. This is the story of a flower with more than one name: Evening Star, Sundrop, Suncup, Night Candle, Lunar Herb, Oenothera biennis, Fleur du Adhan, Fever Plant or King’s Cureall. It is a story governed by the night and accentuated by the light. It is a story of living and finding words. It is a story filled with the dreams of kings and making your home in place you never dared to grow. It is a story of being uprooted, of sleeping, dreaming and waiting. But foremost it is a story of believing in stories not yet told. In stories to be told. This is the story of one flower. It is the story of the Evening Primrose.
'My Ears Are My Eyes' is an installation about the importance of story telling - told through the stroy of one flower. It envovles ceramic vessels, paper flowers, Evening Primrose seedlings in jars, darkness and a moving light, some grow lights, scent and sounds and, of course, stories.
DREAMING IN THE MUSEUM - POTTED PLANTS AS INDICATORS OF TRAUMA IN MUSEOLOGICAL SETTINGS
Thesis
This is the triangular history of potted plants, museum displays and trauma diagnosis. It is a collection of stories across time in different places, gathered almost like a bouquet of flowers – stories of peoples’ lives, stories of potted plants and stories about the way we account for the fragmenting effects traumatic experiences can have. But more than anything else it is a story about hope, wonder, and joy – the joys of experience, and in particular the joys of experiencing art together.