This body of work was made in collaboration with my materials. Generally, they began life with another purpose and then they were fashioned by my response to their inherent properties.
Through my working, these materials have been informed by the intergenerational effects of migration. The plywood offcuts are remnants of previous projects that have been given a new purpose. Elsewhere forms shaped in plasters and others made in pumice intimate the Byproducts of displacement and disorder.
Cardboard boxes, an ambivalent material here suggest two readings, one is the aspirational drive for a better life, and the other, a homage to those who delivered a better life to the coming generation. Each an aspect of migration predicated on a system designed to
generate profit from cheap labour.
The incidental and unexpected behaviour of these materials demanded a response that gifted them another vocabulary. In each this new vocabulary is reflected in the resolution of the work.
The nature of these works, a product of their materials and assemblage, is at times contradictory and at others complimentary evoking for me
senses of detachment and attachment, presence and absence, contact and separation, abandonment and reclamation, permanent and transient.
Here, the process of making has become for me a way of engaging with the Byproducts of displacement and emplacements. Working with these repurposed materials, and assigning them new identities suggests a making good – a reordering of disorder. That is in itself, an arrival.
