Artist Statement
Situated in visually charged and unstable spaces, my work gathers fragments and layers that negotiate the edges where boundaries meet and break: ever-shifting forms that are always unfinished, that simultaneously live and die. I am interested in looking at the interstices of things, at sites of liminality, and at the sameness and indistinguishability of construction and destruction. In medieval folklore the spaces in the margins, those which are betwixt and between — the edge of the sea, between night and day, doorways and thresholds — were thought to be dangerous regions of power and transformation. Crossroads, in many cultures, have often been seen as places of judgment and ritual significance, and as a point of intersection between the worlds of the living and the dead. These marginal spaces are reflected in the themes that my work explores: contradictory bodies that are endlessly in the ‘act of becoming’.
I work in encaustic, an ancient technique of pigmented wax that is applied molten and then re-melted with a blowtorch to fuse every layer to the one beneath it. Encaustic is a medium that is very much concerned with surface — and my surface is highly textured, raised, dense, and heavy with all the levels hidden beneath it. But at the same time, encaustic has the capacity to take on extreme transparency, which enables the simultaneous revealing and concealing of layers. With its corporeal surface texture and translucent nature, encaustic is a material that speaks of the body, visually and tactually resembling human flesh. It encompasses paradoxical states: opacity and translucency, surface and depth, molten and solid, which allows it to occupy its own kind of shifting, unstable space.