How do you describe your own art practice?
I make sculptures that are intended to be experienced close-up. My intent is for them to draw people into their intimacy; sometimes because they make use of a tactile or a sensual appeal and sometimes because they play with scale in relation to the viewer’s body and relate to ideas of personal space.
Steel, pewter, magnets, jewellery, leather, wire.
Photograph by Valentina Suter. Image courtesy of Milieu.
What was your first experience with art?
As a child I was encouraged to understand the world in a very hands-on way by making things, taking things apart and playing in a messy way – a good formative art education! The first time I saw art in gallery context was quite late – I grew up in the countryside and was well into my teens before our first school trip to a gallery. There were a few art magazines in the local library so I’d spend ages looking at the pictures but the writing belonged to a totally different world.
Photograph by Valentina Suter. Image courtesy of Milieu.
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
It sounds bad to say contemporary anxieties are a source of inspiration – but I have a good radar for them and they feed into my work a lot.
Sponge, ceramic, eucalyptus oil.
What do you need in order to create your work?
Messy space to play around, unobserved.
Antibacterial fabric, plaster polymer, eyeshadow, pigment, metal fixings.
Photograph by Valentina Suter. Image courtesy of Milieu.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’ve just finished working on a solo show in Milieu, Bern, and will also show a work in the group show “Lo and Behold; all this is fraud!” there, opening in February 2017.
In the new year I’ll be working towards a show in Temporary Gallery, Cologne and also starting work on a collaborative residency with artists Anna Hughes and Wanda Wieser which will look at the idea of sculptural alignments through a healing/new-age/psycho-geographic lens.
Furthermore, my work is still on show in the exhibition “Bloomberg New Contemporaries” at the ICA in London and in “Femocracy” at Marian Cramer Projects Amsterdam.
Airdry clay, coconut oil, St John’s Wort, frankincense, tea bags.
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
The recent Gillian Lowndes show at the Sunday Painter, London. Lowndes work was new to me but immediately striking: quiet and gnarly beings that talked about the nuts-and-bolts of ceramic processes and insular world-making, but were also precariously lovely things and tough as hell. Very moving.
Ciment fondue, magnets, mixed metallic objects
Photograph by Tim Bowditch. Image courtesy of Zabludowicz Collection.
