Making Connections

Like time, my work doesn’t follow a consistent linear path, but recurring themes crisscross back and forth like an unruly root system.

In 2013, while on an artist’s residency at AIR Krems, Austria, I made a body of work entitled ‘Domestic Interventions’. The work evolved from my curiosity about the past residents of the work/living space I occupied – some of whom were accompanied by their families. While rummaging through cupboards and drawers looking for nails, string, blu-tac, etc, I came across tantalizing traces of time spent in the apartment – incomplete board games, strange condiments, abandoned novels and an assortment of obsolete television aerials.

I reconfigured some of these objects into assemblages that explored ideas around time and location and how we occupy these spaces – in this case within a domestic setting.

At the time I was reading the novel, ‘The Quiet Twin’, by Dan Vyleta, and was struck by a particular passage where Vyleta observes, “It is a curious fact of acoustics that a toilet plunger, skillfully waved before the open bell, can transform the trumpet’s sound into that of the human voice”. It chimed with my sense that by bringing objects together you can change their significance and lend them a different emotional or dynamic resonance – an evocation of time or place.

One of the pieces I was working on pre-empted my suspended seed heads – it was my first attempt at ‘Time, Motion Suspended’. This comes back to a central concern of my work: the known and the unknown; and how we are able to reimagine and reinvent to make some sense of the world and our lived experiences within it.

My work at St Augustine’s, The Past Runs Very Close, continues this thread by exploring how our subjective understanding of time can be informed by the position taken by current theoretical physics. Challenging and at times bewildering, it is, nonetheless quite compelling.