Statement:

I work with social codes and the presentation of gender. I work mainly in performance and painting. Much of what I do explores ideas of sincerity, particularly in relation to theatre and its inherent artifice (which I don’t always assume to be negative). I am interested in social rituals and facades and interrogate ideas intrinsic to the shallow and sometimes affected surface and issues concerning ‘front stage’ (being visible to the audience and therefore complicit in the performance) and ‘back stage’ (where an audience is not present) as Erving Goffman explains. I look at how we commodify gender, identity and language and the way in which we use them for the purpose of power, with a view to understanding the various forces that shape and mould our society.

I like language and play with textual strategies in my work that give display to my belief that language is not transparent. These often take the form of dialogues or scripts that play with components of choreography. The performative, conceptual works echo Henry Flint’s analysis that since concepts are inherently bound to language, conceptual art is a kind of art of which the material is language. I recognise that just as texts are not stable, neither is perception.

As part of my continued search for sincerity I aim to make authentic work, in terms of its honesty and often its non-reproducibility (Walter Benjamin) such as painting and performance, with particularly unauthentic materials such as fake fur. My faux fur/hair works inhabit social structures, such as the political rally and abstract expressionist painting, whilst simultaneously destabilizing them. I want to liberate the spectator from his or her status as passive witness and determine what art does as opposed to what it says.