At the moment there are two factors that define my work: the arduous and often banal process of construction, and colour. Mostly my work is assembled in felt, in a kind of fabric parquetry. People are usually surprised that I hand cut all the felt circles. At times a circle cutter has looked very appealing, but I’m not quite ready to relinquish this ritualised connection to the process. I am attached to the intimacy and presence of the handmade. I am fascinated by work that is awkwardly elegant, not slick.
When I think about my relationship to colour I want to write words like frequency, resonance, magnetism and seduction. Colours can feel transcendent, like Wolfgang Laib’s yellow pollen or Anish Kapoor’s thick red paint. At other times a colour feels dissonant; but the friction is intriguing nonetheless. Like music and sound, colours ask for an instinctual response, it’s something I either just do, or don’t like.
I have been surprised by the way people respond to the colour I use in my work, particularly a temporary mural I did called ‘Aurora Neon Wall’ where I painted an outdoor factory wall in neon pink and lavender stripes. It made perfect sense to me to use neon pink in a semi-industrial street dominated by bricks and cement. The process of putting a work in a public space was a new challenge and I rather naively never considered that some people would be affronted by my use of fluorescent paint. Actually, the word used was ‘offensive’. Bummer !
On the up-side, the mural created a lot of discussion about contemporary art where previously there had been none, and I enjoyed these discussions. All the truck drivers that came to the factory talked affectionately about it, and an old Greek man that lived down the road was so charmed by the work, that he wanted an artist to paint his wall too. The dialogue generated by this simple introduction of colour into the streetscape has definitely made me interested in creating more work like this.
For my most recent work I felt compelled to reduce some of the overtly decorative and totemic motifs in favour of organic shapes and blocks of colour. I don’t know why I made this decision, the evolution of my work comes from deep within my subconscious. As with many things the process of making something appear ‘simpler’ is actually very difficult. Matching a colour to a shape for example sounds easy, and a bit ridiculous, but can be surprisingly tricky.
Published in Artist Profile 2011