It is perhaps an understatement to say we live in tumultuous and polarized times: climate change, the mass extinction of species, the coming of AI, the continuing consequences of colonialism, late capitalism's rising inequality and challenges to our democratic institutions all jostle for attention, response and action.
My work is driven by my need to engage my bewilderment and exasperation with the current world situation. It's informed by my readings of history and political theory. I want to make the ambiguities and disparities I see in the public sphere visible. I am interested in what juxtapositions of divergent paradigms reveal. I love the accidents and the paradoxes they expose, often the inherent absurdity, irony or unsettledness.
I ask how we might approach this bewildering moment without reinforcing the usual dualisms: yours/mine, in/out, right/wrong, acknowledging instead the contradictions that exist at the intersections of identity, economics and politics and so act from there. To this end, I turn my attention to the media-technology-military-industrial complex, to democratic and financial institutions and to citizen resistance/protest. My work starts in ideas and finds its expression in materials that explore and extend my lines of thought. I love to push experimentation and creation. My expanded toolkit includes 3D, drawing, painting, artist book, digital collage, sound, poetry and moving image.
I take inspiration from art and the artists that creatively and urgently address the complex social and political issues of their day, artists like Hannah Höch, George Grosz, Hans Haacke, Francis Alÿs, and Hito Steyerl. I also find germinal the writings of Isabel Stengers, Chantal Mouffe, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. I feel DADA and Surrealism increasingly speak to these times.
My work has been shown in the UK, Canada, South America and Europe and is housed in a number of private collections. Previously I curated twenty+3 projects, a non-commercial, project space located in the front room of my terraced house in Manchester, UK. I now live and work in Toronto.