Recent works : 2016-2021
Poster for Household Name - postponed until May 2021
HouseholdNAME (Press release)
Household Name is a ‘dynamic and timely contemporary art exhibition featuring seven Welsh and Wales-based women artists working in paint, sculpture, film, photography, text and performance. Ranging from internationally renowned practitioners to emerging artists, and all producing bold, innovative, exciting and engaging works. ‘ Household Name features direct responses to the title from questioning the political and the scientific, through to investigations of the domestic setting via witchcraft, gender identity and climate change. The exhibition will open at Elysium Gallery, Swansea at a date tbc. this year.
Fall into Step / NO Doormat, 2016-2021
This body of work for Household Name is a continuation of themes which have emerged over the past few years in my practice shifting from the immediate work around the maternal body as furniture to the house as a body / vessel of a more psychological interaction with the environment of 'home'
From HouseMADE to Household Name
Following on from the HouseMADE residency (2016), where I mapped a personal history onto the very fabric of the house itself using verbal and text based phrases which echo across time and place and interact with the viewer's own apprehension of the work.
This new work examines what we leave behind; it may be a defiant call to rise beyond the furniture, the laundry and the doormat; quietly shouting, as a graffiti artist might tag their presence. But it could be any of us, moving through the house, growing up, changing and leaving. It will be our names, labelled, marked through a process of making, using a slow process of 'pushing' 'punching' and 'poking'.
From a childhood self pitting fear against routine via a set of stairs, to acknowledging my own mortality within a family which seems to be moving beyond me; the Household name is me reclaiming via embodiment of our names, a shout out from within to beyond furniture, the laundry and the floor.
photo credits:
Josh Leeson (above)
Peter Evans (below)
'Fall into Steps' with Eve Dent, 2016 HOUSEMADE
Sanctuary video install, 2016 HOUSEMADE
'Cree' (safe space) installation, 2016 HOUSEMADE
Net Fans with June Campbell-Davies, 2016 HOUSEMADE
Walls, 2017
Walls was a piece developed as part of my Creative Wales Award, presented in 2016, and dealt with nostalgia, loss, impermanence vs. permanence, breaking buildings down to what is absorbed in the bricks, the very containers of lives been and gone. Using found recordings of my father interviewing my grandmother from 40 years ago, and now both deceased, alongside recordings taken from within my own domestic environment, the hum of life, I created a series of reactive ‘speakers’ shaped as fragile bricks which played a different recording as your presence alerted a hidden sensor.
Surrounding the installation of the double helix shaped sound ‘containers’ which played the voice tracks was a continous moving wall, a never ending loop, creating a vertigo like vortex.
The work involved using new technologies like computer etching, sensor technology, but also involved collaboration with sound artist Simon Gore and video artist Joe Marvelly to realise this presentation of the work, which is in hiatus, but ongoing.
It was an important stage in working through feelings of grief, being able to articulate that experience which has to be faced, common to us all in life.
Clip of looped video from Walls installation 2016
projected in 360 surround
