I am a
scavenger, digger and collector. An artist, environmentalist and
imperfectionist. I thrive foraging in bins and bushes for the perfect piece of
plastic or creamy clump of clay. My work floats in a post-capitalist framework,
using a limitless supply of unwanted and unvalued mud and waste to create a
tangible, tactile something, like a pot or plastic painting. Exclusively using
foraged natural materials and waste, my work’s ecological outlook aims to
repair our disconnection with nature. My material choices defying current
conventions surrounding nature and consumerism by prioritising material cycles
and stories.
Recently
digging, filtering, hand building and naturally firing ceramics brings focus to
a domestic, feminist space. I dig the clay in a pond where I paddled growing
up. The slow, labour intensive filtering process is all-consuming yet
energising, sorting muddy rocks to challenge consumerist conventions. After a
laborious filtering and sculpting process, the ceramics are set on fire with
organic matter such as food waste and menstrual blood, creating mystical and
unpredictable patterns. It is a constant collaboration with nature, revelling
in unknown variables. As well as rooted in my childhood, the clay empowers me,
cathartically processing my environmental anxieties through grounding myself in
a mud and pot practice. The process is the practice, manifesting in
sculptures, obsessive photographic archiving, rudimental videos and compulsive
rubbish and food waste stashes which saturate my cupboards ready for future
work. My methods also rethink institutional barriers by contextualising craft
within fine art, through research on Aristotle’s material hierarchy and
feminist vessels.
I revel
in my process which slows me down to clay time, unable rush the drying drip of clay.
The process energises and grounds me. It allows me space to revel in my amateur
craftspersonship and my unfinished, untidy, in motion, and unmonumental
presentation where materials come directly from my surroundings and are
intuitively formed by hand. This spontaneous yet slow method makes my studio
and work alive, like a garden in spring, flowing and growing in cycles of
chrysalis and development. The mud has become a part of me, an extension of an anti-capitalist
attitude which shapes my decisions in life and work. And once the foraged mud
has turned to pots, my favourite phenomenon occurs; as the pots themselves prompt
foraging for flowers to fill them, further reconnecting the owner to nature.
