CV
Artist Statement
My ceramic/sculptural practice launches a humorous, freewheeling attack on our complicity to the white noise and emptiness that surrounds us. Rendered from clay and modelled on toys, the ceramic figures and sculptures revel in their contradictions. A hybrid between art, machine and toy, they maintain a circus-like sense of amusement and curiosity for the viewer while sending up societal norms and politics.
The resulting ceramic ‘cartoons’ are multilayered representations of the absurdities and petty idiocies of political and cultural discourse. The beauty of caricature is that it’s easily understood. I render these images in ceramic to give them greater gravitas— granting them a sense of permanence, delicacy, and artistic merit that elevates the works above the traditional, fundamentally ephemeral place of caricature and satire.
Using ceramics to create the familiar in the form of toys and dolls, my work involves the deployment of the innocent, the incongruous and the seemingly banal as a means of communicating with the viewer in less threatening and more persuasive terms. The cartoon sculptures stimulate a disjunct in the viewer’s mind – between the cute, perky nature of the ceramics and the politically charged content.
My works celebrate the lavishly eccentric design of past eras and the sense of possibility they embodied. As hackneyed as it sounds, a Brave New World is upon us, stranger perhaps than our imaginations can conceive of. While casting a disparaging eye on the world, the work retains a playful, humorous edge. I am not interested in producing depressing or macabre images. Rather, my work sends up and parodies the status quo as though we are glimpsing it through a funfair’s distorted mirror.
Artist Statement
My ceramic/sculptural practice launches a humorous, freewheeling attack on our complicity to the white noise and emptiness that surrounds us. Rendered from clay and modelled on toys, the ceramic figures and sculptures revel in their contradictions. A hybrid between art, machine and toy, they maintain a circus-like sense of amusement and curiosity for the viewer while sending up societal norms and politics.
The resulting ceramic ‘cartoons’ are multilayered representations of the absurdities and petty idiocies of political and cultural discourse. The beauty of caricature is that it’s easily understood. I render these images in ceramic to give them greater gravitas— granting them a sense of permanence, delicacy, and artistic merit that elevates the works above the traditional, fundamentally ephemeral place of caricature and satire.
Using ceramics to create the familiar in the form of toys and dolls, my work involves the deployment of the innocent, the incongruous and the seemingly banal as a means of communicating with the viewer in less threatening and more persuasive terms. The cartoon sculptures stimulate a disjunct in the viewer’s mind – between the cute, perky nature of the ceramics and the politically charged content.
My works celebrate the lavishly eccentric design of past eras and the sense of possibility they embodied. As hackneyed as it sounds, a Brave New World is upon us, stranger perhaps than our imaginations can conceive of. While casting a disparaging eye on the world, the work retains a playful, humorous edge. I am not interested in producing depressing or macabre images. Rather, my work sends up and parodies the status quo as though we are glimpsing it through a funfair’s distorted mirror.
