My work is essentially research of the farmland that I live on and is an ode to nature as a whole. My concern with material and moral tensions manifests in juxtapositions of the new against the old, the natural against the manufactured, graphic against gore. I work with animal skins and found and recycled materials to present some of the unnoticed beauty of the natural world in scenes and abstract glimpses of farm-life.
Conversations about the ethical issues the work evokes, are as important to me as making the work itself. I’m intensely excited by the often beautiful process and discomfort caused by decomposition; although we can prolong it, we can’t ever really stop it.
G.M. Hopkin’s love of "everything fickle and freckled", and Sara Baume’s intimate, detail-oriented lens, inform my passion for the natural world, as I aim to foster care for it and in turn delineate the potential healing power it can offer.
Sheepskin stretched onto hand-painted ornate frame, 60 x 80cm (front view)
Sheepskin stretched onto hand-painted ornate frame, 60 x 80cm (view from side)
Sheepskin stretched onto hand-painted ornate frame, 60 x 80cm (view from back)
Hareskin stretched onto hand-painted ornate frame, 60 x 80cm (front view)
Hareskin stretched onto hand-painted ornate frame, 60 x 80cm (view from back)
Installation view
'Almost A Landscape', 50 x 60 cm
'Skullmination'; Intense drawing research of sheep skulls and one shrew skull that I found, 61.5 x 35cm
Research
'Just Inside the Barn Door', 80 x 80cm
This was my first time skinning a sheep (who died naturally). It deals with issues of ritual and ethics and explores the beauty of decomposition, 30 x 45 x 5cm