The objects, images, recordings and performance actions that I create often involve repetition, corruption and distortion, acknowledging the ghosts of memory and loss and the space of swallowed rhythms, repressions and omissions. The arrangement of consciously theatrical forms often suggests sort of fractured tableaux of ritual props, artefacts or finds - an uneasy mix of the ancient and modern - exploring the vacillatory position of aesthetics when employed, on the one hand, by the artist to select, highlight and critique, and, on the other hand, by ideological or political institutions, hierarchies or bodies for whom aesthetics serve as dutiful carrier of the message.
The transmission and reception of information and the ability (or lack thereof) of a material to mediate between these poles is also crucial to my practice. Paint's mercurial ability, for instance, to flip between dumb, intractable 'stuff' and fleet-footed carrier of image provided a means through which I began asking questions about the real and the mediated, object and image, the physical and the intangible, language and image, language and sound. Recent work has alluded to the early, faltering days of TV and radio broadcast and the inherent strangeness of those flickering, ether-bound images and voices - the early radio or TV studio as 'séance room' - where our initial grappling with the uncanniness of the recording or broadcasting of the human voice or image marked a shift in broader human consciousness and self-awareness.
In the midst of recent solo exhibition Chinagraph Spill Cracked Oil Cracked Oil I placed a group of toner transfer prints of images drawn from the early days of broadcasting showing performers' hands clutching scripts during rehearsal, performance or recording. Around these are constructed - as if in response to these 'prompts' - tableaux of objects and images which seem to suggest a playful and highly theatrical altercation between language, image and object: a mise-en-scène that could perhaps have formed the stage set for a group of stumbling and stuttering characters in some mid-twentieth century absurdist drama. The physically weighty object or the highly-considered compositional decision rub shoulders with material slightness and off-the-cuff marks and gestures, implying a space of hesitancy and indeterminacy - a meditation upon spontaneity, deliberation, artifice and the editing process.