Biography
Having trained in photography video and digital imaging, I have worked as an artist for over ten years now. I like to take a ‘practice lead’ approach to creating work responding to spaces, people and locations. My recent preoccupations have been with notions of home, community and territory and how we map landscape. There is a strong sense of social and community engagement that runs through the work that I create and I strive to make work that challenges, inviting the audience to re-examine the way they perceive their environment. In practice this often involves returning to familiar locations to record, collect and make my work, finding ways to illuminate, animate and reinterpret space employing photography, video projection, text, illustration and models.
Proposal
I have long been interested in the symbol of home and what that means to people locally and globally. How people’s sense of the world and themselves is so intricately bound to their notions of home has been the main focus of much of my work. I am currently developing a new body of work that examines temporary refuge and shelter; this will take the form a video work using homemade white tents and is about refuge. A single screen video work that simply documents a lone tent in the wilderness, as the time moves from day to night we see the tent begin to illuminate and spread it’s light out on to the landscape creating its own territory and space within the darkness. From a personal perspective and involvement in the Scout movement through out my youth the Tent has interesting connections with Nyrie as the leader of the Scout movement is buried there. In current times the White tent puts in to mind the situation of displaced populations, and gives this simple symbol of home and shelter a further a sense of fragility. So it these fragile and temporary ideas of home that I will explore to create a series of four video and photographic works for Sanctuary.
