Materials as old as the earth fascinate me because of their stoic permanence and the way that makes you feel. I wanted to know what it would be like to work with stone, new tools and processes, so in 2015, I travelled to the Isle of Portland for a long weekend of stone carving.
It was slow and sometimes painful work but I loved the physical experience, sculpting in a quarry and learning about the history of Portland stone.
When I returned to London I enrolled in a part-time sculpture course at the Art Academy. I needed to be liberated from my desk, with room to play in a workshop and the opportunity to use different materials. There's a lot of illusion in screen based work and I wanted to create something tangible in the real world.
During a life drawing class, I became interested in seeing how far I could reduce and abstract the lines before the appearance of a human body was lost. This exploration led me to experiment further with plasticine, from which I created individual body parts and assembled them in different configurations.
I cut five body parts out of wire and coated each maquette, with long thin strips of bandage, dipped in quick drying plaster. I had to work quickly to smooth the contours by hand before the plaster hardened. It was very tricky! To bring them into a more defined shape, I filed and smoothed down each piece until the texture, balance and proportion felt pleasing and consistent with the others.
The process was slow and messy with no easy way to undo a mistake. If the plaster dried too quickly or I filed too harshly, I could not instantly reverse the result. I had to keep adding more layers of plaster and filing down, until the new shape felt good in my hands.
This sculpture asks the viewer to consider the idea of ownership. The body they inhabit and who controls it. How and which parts are seen and the notion that a person who appears to be complete is in fact a collection of fragments that we the viewer assemble in our minds and make whole. The pieces on their own mean little, but when put together the half limbs, torso and head convey the collective mood and feelings of a real person. We fill in the missing parts, connect the lines and fill in the spaces to convince ourselves of oneness. To bring unity and complete the image. This portrait can be physically assembled and presented in a number of ways. The viewer is invited to move and connect (or disconnect) the pieces that make the person. Each pose then conveys a personal and different feeling from the last. And each time the portrait appears to be whole yet remains fragmented. By dismantling and reconstructing the figure, we are confronted with the absurdity of the bodies we inhabit and the sense of a person being a feeling we create inside ourselves.