Artists Statement

My work develops from an interest in the body, in particular relationships to certain man-made materials, exploring the way in which they can adjust to the body and can be shaped around it. My interest is in the tensions that are created when these materials are brought together and intertwined with the body, to relate ideas of physical comfort, malleability, and also restraint.

In this process the body becomes fragmented, over-encumbered and dissolved, but there is also a deliberate ambiguity of struggle and mergence in the works. The body becomes treated as an equivalent material- an object that can be shaped, adjusted and re-organized.

Though delicately approached the work also takes reference from the abject visceral body, exploring ideas of shame, bodily control and concealment. Thus in both subject and application there is a struggle present - comfort and malleability, fine detail and violent occurrences, release and tension, reasonable and monstrous.

'We cannot express our anxieties in signs - they seem too insubstantial - so the whole burden of aggressivity is borne by the body and our bodies become ill to signify that there is a conflict somewhere. It is in this context that artists use the body – or something close to the body; as a sign. It is never a pure body, it is always subverted, transformed, an object at the frontier of subject and object, of word and flesh.'
Julia Kristeva, Rites of Passage, Art for the end of the century, p26