MY PRACTICE since the early 2000’s has involved painting, drawing, installation, and the encounter between the fragile relations of aesthetics, materiality, process, and contingencies of place. By jostling between image and object, and the relation itself, the flow between the ‘original’ and the ‘ensuite’, and the mode of repetition and similarity, I aimed to call attention to the sensual space in which everything is entangled. I have been heavily influenced by the philosophy of Graham Harmon’s Object Orientated Ontology, Tim Morton’s weirdly withdrawn presences and Michel Serres’s philosophy of mixes in the middle.
More recently, having settled into an art practice in a small regional town, outside of any university programme, with the concurrent opportunities of exhibition space and audience, my interests have shifted away from the meta-site between lived-in space and abstract shape towards two similar but more exacting concerns: how the geometric itself functions, can it be autonomous, ‘alive’ even; and how can I explore this within the spatial dimensions of the specific field of Painting. A field I once thought narrowed by the frame, I am now embattled with the need to resist simply placing painted or drawn objects into so-called real space, and instead follow a more specific curiosity about the selfhood of pictorial space, to not imagine it as quite so singular. The flattened-out space of the monochromatic, the unassuming noise of colour as material, the geometric presence, together could highlight subtleties of more precarious states of materiality. I hope to discover a more noumenal understanding of the nature of painting, of its own thinking body.
Harman - “Objects are sleeping giants holding their forces in reserve, and do not unleash all their energies all at once” (Immaterialism” 7:2016)