* press bio  

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Artists Statement - Autumn Equinox 2023 

My main concerns as an artist are intrinsically bound to questions around consensus realities, socially constructed hierachies and emancipatory concerns through a feminist lens.  

I enact performative rites, actions and pilgrimages which then feed back into my exhibited practice, choosing to engage in an art making which is often cyclical, mystical or site specific, hoping to manifest a form of social ecological reclamation, utilising magick as a technology of  selfhood. 

  Taking my own neurodiverse phenomenology as a starting point, that of an othered female goverened by intuition, allowing for entangled patterns of being to exist which are combined with materials both transient and permanent, often site/time specific such as earth/clay, ash, human hair and plant matter.  I am interested in how weaving these elements together can lead through to an othered way of understanding and communing with the more than human world. My art making is often collaborative, whether with other biological kin or humans, both living and deceased.   

I propose these tactics, of intentional scripting, alongside subverting capitalist trajectories by incorporating esoteric methodologies, as one way in which we can create and shape our own future mythologies and attempt to re-gain some form of agency rather than be the harbringers of doom in the face of ecological harm. 

In assuming a quietly disruptive role, can art be a form of consequential conduit for re-aquaintance between this world and the ‘other’ ... embodying the possibility to move beyond the current impasse?  

...

  My present concurrent bodies of work,  working with wild clay sourced from specific sites, are bourne from earlier research  which has re-emerged whilst at Goldsmiths.
  On considering how social/gender inequalities and capitalism were enabled by land enclosure and the witchtrials, and by bringing the politics of ancient common land into the contemporary discourse,  these unravelled stories contribute to the much larger intersectional reclaimation of womens authority over their own bodies, and of a desperate need for mutual aid in symbiosis with the more than human world.  

More about the ongoing concerns can be found here

Embodied Earth and Witch Vessels

Digging hole on ancient land - a relic for the harvest 

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The Seer and a World Inbetween - a performance in 2 acts (extract)- text to accompany work shown as part of the group show Esoterisk Överföring. Studio 44 Gallery, Stockholm 2019

I'm aware of my feet sinking, into the slightly damp unfamiliarly familiar ground, as I rub my toes together, relishing the gently abrasive grains of sand and the sense of nothingness ... with the taste of salt water on my lips, I breathe the dank green seaweed, but hear no rasping call of the birds.

As I slowly flex my neck and look around, all is dark, there is a heavy all encompassing stillness here, blanketed, like the night sky after a large firework display ... the last flares can just be seen glimmering slightly somewhere over to my right, where I assume the horizon of this place must be, the usual existential awareness having been dissolved ... I experience a feeling of sublime void.

Over to my left up on some higher ground, upon a precipice overlooking the sea, is some kind of a slab or table top ... glimmering white ... adorned with various objects I can't make out.

I begin to walk slowly towards this table, aware that I am fully conscious but feel as I am inhabiting another being, in another world ... looking down at my hands for confirmation, as I near the table, which now seems to be some kind of altar I notice for the first time a figure ... the forms now becoming more solid I can make out some of the objects, the figure cloaked in red, hooded, sits as still as stone at the table, I see that s/he is gazing into the bowl her hands are held around, I notice something about the fingers

she solemnly raises her head and looks straight at me,

I am facing myself ...













On Performative Hierophanies - a presentation given at Trans-States Conference, September 2019



As the milky moon creeps across the sky

ash and pomegranate juice painting on textile - part of the ongoing series Marking Time, exhibited at Salong Odengatan, Stockholm, May 2019
I remember when we were still underground, being amongst the roots and grubs and those beautiful fat rhizomic tubers ...  it seems that, now, I too have reincarnated, along with the hare  ...
we attempted to inhabit another time ... did not dare to contemplate, the future that never was,  as here we stand on this precipice and gaze up at her,  the unwavering full bloated moon, milky white and seeming to mock me as she creeps across the sky and slowly back into my womb ...





3 walks - text as footnotes to 3 psychogeographic walks, culminating in a ritual performative piece, Stockholm 2018

SHADOWS LIKE MY STAINS - 3 ANCHOR POINTS - STRATIFICATION OF THE UNFAMILIAR - CUT OUT -TO REPRESENT - PERSONAL EXCAVATIONS - A FINAL CONFIRMATION

THE LAY OF THE LAND - CONSUMED AND DEVOURED - THE DIRT WHICH NOURISHED MY BODY - 2 BLOOD MOONS LATER

HOW LONG CAN A MOMENT LAST - STRIPPED BARE - THE PAST - LUMINOUS, LIKE BIRCH BARK - A BLOOD PROMISE - COLD SPRING, BITTER ROOTS - WHEN THE FIRE HAS BURNT OUT - THROUGH THE ASH, BLACK AS COAL - I RISE WITH THE SUN

Anecdotal Evidence and Magickal Realisms                      Artist statement from 2012

My practice is intrinsically bound to the discourse around constructs of power, politics and personal free will, around questions of authenticity and authority, often considering the role of memory, place and perception in relation to concepts of origin or cultural norms.

Using sometimes overlooked areas of cultural histories, or otherness, as a starting point - whether physical hinterlands, lives of those on the perimeter or the murky area where the unconscious meets with the unexplained – I place them in relation to current structures of power and societal divisions.

This invariably leads to examination of the increasing alienation from others in society, and our environment - whether natural or urban, the continuing separation of folk knowledge, and how our access to ancestral and cultural understanding is manipulated by the media. I incorporate aspects of western esoteric thought into some of my work, as a valid tool for re-examining these issues rather than as a glib offering to current trends.

By incorporating aspects of ethnography, psychogeography and bricolage I attempt to question accepted thinking around myth and reality. My installations* being a collection of objects, an inventory of artefacts, some found, some fabricated. I interpret these as forensics from a collected cultural memory, archetypes and signifiers whose interpretation can alter according to the experience, belief and perception of the spectator, but the meaning remains the same.

* Human Nature, part II included an interactive performance Ritual which acted as a footnote to the props and artefacts within the installation.

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H u m a n N a t u r e ?                                                          2013/2014

the forensics of idealism suspended artefacts fabricated nostalgias

IN THE PAST WE ARE ALWAYS PRESENT

Human nature is an ongoing series of work exhibited in parts -

Part 1 - June 2013

Part 2 - September 2013

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Sanitary  2013

Sanitary is a series of work relating to western society's psychological
relationship with the female body, how this relationship has been
controlled through historical use of language and the subsequent
alienation from our natural environment. Specifically relating to the
English Witch Trials, the causality between persecution of the literate women in the villages, the emergence of the land enclosure act and capitalism .
The trials thus used in a deliberate political act to control and undermine
the role of women in rural societies.

pure clean sanitary spotless unsullied unadulterated innocent virtuous

smutty soiled stained unclean indecent vulgar salacious profane
The human body, the blood, hair,
flesh in all its dirty glory, seems so alien to the constructed,
seems to mock the ordered, logical world of institutions and concrete
building, of manmade religions and controlling shame.

Whilst humankind struggle to
ignore their evolutionary roots, try to leave the wild subconscious
behind, to progress by building ever safer and sanitised false
environments, to wash away the past’ through form, function and
order, the body continues to be.

Technology moves forward with
civilisations, biological evolution continues, but, the social psyche
is somehow still stuck in the divisive aftermath of the witch trials
regarding the female body

Installation - porcelain, soap, hair, soil, branches, twigs

Bookworks - porcelain, soap and screenprint on found material,
(unwashed) 2013

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The Carnival Is Over                                        2006
text to a series of prints, projection and found objects

soundtrack - Kicking Against the Pricks, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Transgressions occur through not necessarily conscious actions, the actuality of the event imagined through evidence left behind.

These clues which, though ambiguous, serve to signify the frustration, loss and alienation experienced through being. When the carnival is over the human condition remains and all that relates, through growth, nature, animality, lust, dirt and subsequent decay.