My practice, located at the convergence of anthropology, biology, and sacred art, spans a variety of means in response to diverse contexts. Working from often contradictory stances, I negotiate the entanglement of materialism and teleological thinking by means of a dialectic with the ideas of contingency and purpose.

I construct collections, narratives and scenarios that intervene in scientific, spiritual and cultural areas by disrupting, reconciling and playing primarily with the idea that reality can only be perceived through the fiction of idealised models. The themes of these settings often deal with notions of origins and destiny referencing the nexus between nature and culture particularly in relation to evolutionary theory.

Concerns with methodology have recently led me to address the parallels between shifts in art and biology from object centred study to the analysis of systems. Through a natural philosophical, contextually flexible approach I aim at fostering a spectrum of interpretations and constantly repositioning mindsets. Embedding contradictions into the work is a strategy for delaying interpretation and creating space for the emergence of new relationships. Personally this involves transacting between the emotional impact of subjective poetic constructs and the rational ambivalence and ambiguity of self-conscious critical analysis.

Physically and conceptually I work primarily by accretion, from the simpler to the more complex, constructing corporeal and relational architectures that serve to catalyse further evolutions. The resulting decrease in entropy at some point reverses towards chaos at which point I engage in a reduction of the nonessential. This ebb and flow of internal energy is the heartbeat of what I do.

When working on the transpositions of concepts into material ‘vehicles’, I negotiate between empirical knowledge and imaginative conjecture. The result is a precipitation of symbolic objects and ceremonial enactments that serve to reify, correlate and narrate. The main physical vehicles I use include: ceramics as a plastic means of drawing in a synchronous tension between durability and extremely fragility referencing questions of permanence relative to time and circumstance; pinhole photography and video as two points from which to approach the recording of the passage of time; sound as a conceptual means of structuring the invisible and ephemeral.

15 February 2012