Artist Statement

My practice operates within the realms of sculpture and installation, using found objects, writing and craft. It is often poetic through an act of remembering, drawing on personal nostalgia and collective memories through British culture within objects, interiors and traditions. 

Through making and collecting objects, I investigate nostalgia as a generational cultural phenomenon, interested in how it offers a sense of community and belonging through the role of storytelling. My work navigates aspects of interiors and architecture within cultural spaces that offer a space of comfort within childhood and working class culture.  

I am consistently informed by how space can be philosophised as utopia, dystopia and heterotopia, which refers to a concept by Michel Foucault as worlds within worlds. I use this to understand order and behaviour in space, and how a particular group of heterotopias can bring comfort, happiness and escapism. It is interesting to also consider how happiness is constructed politically and socially; whilst building on Sara Ahmed’s writing; happiness may be understood as something to obtain, promised to us, and an experience changeable due to class and culture. The significance of belief systems and order is also central to my practice in exploring our cultural understanding of happiness, hopes and wishes, whilst also the comfort it brings, through examining existing societal structures, superstitions and folklore. 

With regards to the work’s domestic influences, I like to also consider the act of daydreaming and remembering, how memory is constructed, and physically how objects of an interior space change and move through time, and then become romanticised. The materiality is often influenced by the domestic tropes present in British pubs, examining the sentimental Victorian influences in the interior and architecture. I am interested in how these spaces can provide a sense of comfort and refuge whilst simultaneously be destructive. I often collect objects that evoke a nostalgia, holding cultural significance and familiarity, combining this with cathartic traditional craft processes such as tufting, mosaic and writing.