Recipient of the Drawing Studio Award.
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THE NATURE OF LOVE
‘Trauma and shit going down in childhood is [not] inherently interesting…it’s chronic, commonplace, sometimes dramatic and often tedious in its stranglehold of repetitions, daily struggles, and predictable and unpredictable outcomes, and no one gets out alive.’ – Meera Atkinson, Traumata
My practice is a quest for remembering, categorising, and sifting the factual from the fictional. What belongs to me and what belongs to others? What do I know? What did I invent? And what exactly have I forgotten?
The Nature of Love is a semi-autobiographical, fantastical reimagining of childhood, attachment, and trauma. Using ephemeral materials, and found objects that evoke a sense of nostalgia, I seek to transplant the audience to a place of reminiscence.
Focusing on primary attachments, social conditioning, and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, the artworks I create are concerned with the complexities and nuances of traumatic memory. Specifically, I aim to articulate the ambiguous nature of memory, distorted by imprinting, mutation, and forgetting.
I explore fragmented memory through tactile sensation, using construction and craft to generate a palette of transformed actualities that recalls the past as a dark fable or forgotten memoire, imbued with ancestral memories weighing on, though not necessarily belonging to, the person in question. Combining elements from the found, the historical and the self-authored, my practice produces absent, disembodied, or fragmented forms that speak to the polarising human experiences of familiarity and fear.
I believe that art-making can be a form of therapy, the process allowing for deep exploration and connection with self. By means of introspection and empathy, I hope to create a tangible point of reference within the inexpressible.
Perhaps it is necessary to actualise, to make real, the imagined, the lost, and the embellished, in order to find truth.
