“Obscenity begins when there is no more stage […] A good illusion is a bad illusion, and a bad illusion is a good illusion” —Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact.
My practice often plays with the associative pathways evoked by the relationship between identifiable components within a work. Using new materials and objects every work, my sculptural process often begins with deconstructing or altering an identifiable form, isolating components and tweaking them until they become a field of indeterminate signifiers. In a play of appearances, I work on skewing the interpretive pathways the viewer usually takes, not allowing the audience to create a complete narrative, in favour of one that shifts and moves. Within my constructed visual riddles, the narrative presented is superfluous, the process of its creation is where the content lies.
My artwork uses theatrical tropes as a stage to explore the sculptural forms within. Like a play, a story is presented, where the viewer chooses to believe that the stitch between the face and the mask doesn’t exist, and the body becomes something larger than itself. In real time, actors and playwrights cannot perfectly simulate real life occurrences, and because of this gap that is created, the imagination has room to play. My work consists of a series of these gaps, part forms that work together as clues, giving hints to what the scene is trying to portray. Yet within these flimsy constructions of loose narratives, nothing believes in itself. No narrative left complete, each part reveals its construction to the viewer, or is broken by another conflicting form.
This work is a reflection of a very loose and specific experience of how things are represented in this world. Specifically, I made the work through an examination of how we understand objects, where any content is understood in relation to an abstract category of itself, transparency of appearance into pure operativity. Where objects once had opportunity for depth and personal connection, are now having their symbolic content eclipse the object and flatten its existence. A sentiment of awe of the world exists within my sculpture, a yearning for the sublimity present when things are immersed in themselves. The other pole hidden latently within the work is the awareness that I will never achieve this immersion into anything, burdened to be outside of something. It is the seduction between these opposing forces where the content of the work lies.