Looking Forward
I was commissioned to create two figurative sculptures for the centenary of this renowned secondary school. I decided to use the landscape to create tension between a girl in the original uniform of 1919 gazing across the field under the imposing school building, towards a young student in modern clothes, looking out and considering this figure from the past, what has been achieved in this century and possible future vistas.
The figures were cast in bronze resin at LSS casting
Creative Data
This project ran at the opening evening of “Ink Press Go!” at The Mill in March 2017.
Arts organisations need to provide data about their audience to funding bodies. This information gives valuable insights into how people engage with the arts, but the information is not neutral. It is often necessary to quantify the social good that a project does in order to justify the funding (which is a bit like nailing jelly to a wall), or it can be a market research exercise.
This project is an experiment using data collection.
The questionnaire asks questions that are useful to the organisers and the artists taking part, and that may be of interest to the audience.
The process contrasts the choices we are given in questionnaires with the choices involved in a creative process, and how both experiences affect us.
The display can be read as codified data – all the answers can be referenced to the key – and it becomes information provided by and for the audience community, the artists and the organisers.
The show can also be seen as a collective artwork, changing the role of the audience community. It is a bit like an abstract group selfie, and considers the methods we use to understand others.
Mapping Walthamstopia
This project was located on Fellowship Island during the Walthamstow Garden Party in July 2017.
“Help design the ‘Stow of your dreams! Draw, print, write and stick your utopian plans of the future onto a giant map of Walthamstow.”
The Waiting Project
The Waiting project consisted of six life-size plaster sculptures of people waiting around Walthamstow. I wanted to explore how we communicate our inner lives through our bodies. I also wanted to place sculptures in spaces where people had time to consider them.
They were at The Mall, The Firs doctors’ surgery, The Mill (that one’s still there), The Pumphouse Museum, the bus station and outside my studio. They were exhibited during the 2012 E17 Art Trail, then at The Mill the following year accompanied by local poems about waiting, and a few made it to the town hall.
Random Access Memory
As part of a ‘Space and Place’ art theory course at City Lit in spring 2017 we were asked to create a mind map of one of the sessions.
I once had a conversation with a friend who said they had studied Lacan. I expressed my admiration and she said “yeah, but I don’t remember any of it”. That exchange informed this piece. It is a longhand rendition of the notes I studiously took of everything that happened in the session on ‘Site Specific Art’, stored in an archive box.
Persona Profiler Marketing Fish
These cellophane fish were a collaboration with Lucy Chapman. They were distributed at the Something Collective show “Unspeakable” in 2015. The personality types are all taken from the Audience Agency report of 2014, describing the distinct audience groups who visit art galleries.
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