Fragments and stories

I think that’s what my work boils down to in its essence, working with fragments and stories. Whatever the medium, the same tools, concerns and themes reappear.

Book art, sculpture, installation, video.

Format, structure, position, word play.

Collaborative, interactive, immersive, narrative.

Cities, texts, time, memory.

I spent a lot of time learning to set type – in metal. You take each of the letters and you line them up to form words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages of type. It’s messy and labour intensive and involves a lot of planning in advance. You lay the text and the white space between it on the bed of a press, lock it in place and run off a print. Perhaps create a book. But the person who reads the book never sees the metal or any of the work that’s gone into producing what they hold in their hands. They read the story and hopefully it takes them to places of their own.

The metal gets put back in its cases ready to make other stories or to set poetry or produce invitations… all these fragments to be used again.

I make sculptures and installations that often need some form of viewer interaction or engagement to complete the piece. And I also work with small loops of video, small fragments, combined, mixed and effected to make longer pieces, often projected live and often in collaboration with other artists, each of us bringing our talents together to make something bigger.

Sometimes I want to tell a specific story though my work, sometimes I want to set up a situation for the viewer or person who interacts with a piece to tell their own through it or with it, often I want to enable a combination of the two.

And then sometimes I’ll collect and arrange fragments with no real goal other than to see what happens, how they connect, because who likes reading stories when they already know the ending.