My relationship with materials

This is true in my inspirations and the materials I use, the two working together, intrinsically linked and feeding off each other. I am fascinated by the idea of transformation, and I look for materials that have the potential to become something more. Everything around us is constantly evolving, with each repetition of an action creating movement and change. Through my work, I try and capture this.

I have an almost romantic view of the complexity of energy and matter, finding excitement in knowing that we remain blissfully unaware of what we can't physically see; within moments everything changes but the effects of this shift is viewed in millennia, not seconds.

The senses that dominate my thinking aren’t fixed but movable bending to the subject. I look for the echoes of expended energy, the marks of time, the visible versus the unseen and what we can only hope to understand.

Sometimes it’s about sight and touch, feeling a rock, moving it in my hands trying to understand its shape, its weight, the colours interacting, whether I can alter it in some way. I don’t just see the rock but millennia of energy embedded in the geology. We see order, lines that can be traced to movement, environmental conditions and time. That single moment, hiding the chaos that was crucial in its creation.

Other times it’s about feeling and imagining, looking up at the stars and realising that what I see no longer exists, I’m seeing a snapshot through time, stars dying and others being born. What we see looks chaotic but has an order controlled by attraction, repulsion and entropy.

For me, scale is often irrelevant, with objects belying their size - small things can be magnificent and large can be obscured In the same way that nature evolves, I look for materials that also have the potential to be transformed. I want to feel that I can have a relationship with the material; whereby I learn about its make up, push its properties, and see the potential it has to become something more. This excites me and drives me to understand and to make more connections.

I try not to be limited by finding similar materials but to choose those that are intriguing whether it is latex which begins as an opaque liquid and ends as transparent, ice which decays in moments, or clay and plaster with their direct connection to the earth. What I want to do is to be able to add colour, texture and the mark of my hand in such a way that that the result is ambiguous and evocative