My current research occupies the scope of human – non-human relations through direct material encounters. I continue to be interested in exploring what objects do in a field of visual signification. Working across painting, ceramics, and sculpture I attend to materials, engaging with ideas tied to loss, destruction, and precarity. I acknowledge connections with and through matter challenging dominant systems which uphold human exceptionalism.
I work between the intersections of abstraction and figuration embracing making processes as the source of where and how my thinking and learning unfolds. I am currently a part time, practice led PhD candidate at Duncan of Jordanstone, The University of Dundee exploring Matters of Entanglement: exploring making and metaphor as expansive ways of being and thinking.
My research addresses a material, creative practice through which energetic forces, metaphor, notions of entanglement, vital materialism, and post-humanist ideas are explored. The research relates closely to age-old questions about ways of being and knowing, framed within contemporary modes of art practice. Matters of Entanglement reflects a body of artwork which positions things at the centre and acknowledges the influence of Heidegger, in his 1968 work What is a Thing? the examination, and rejection, of a tradition of thinkers and makers who challenge systems of Cartesian, dualistic thinking as a dominant nature/culture divide, is integral to this research.
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I am materially supported by the waste resource company, Binn Group in rural Perthshire for my research project.