The kiss

kiss, snog , make - out , make - up , fall in love , fall out of love , heart break.

                                                      The girl

My work is centred around language and text, and the categories they create, I construct narratives that seem to have human character from inane objects - a paper chain becomes a control freak, a toilet brush holder becomes a shy boyfriend losing his way in a relationship - texts are teased until they become a  ‘humanised abstraction’ and then are read as ‘I’ the artist, my tone becoming the centre for any number of characters.

 

The images come separately, I take an image or a drawing that I already feel has some currency, such as a news item or piece of history, then highlight the parts I feel are important with shapes, the rest of the image is faded away until it becomes a block colour, by doing this I simultaneously highlight a sub text to the narrative, and refuse to give a face or place to the story I have developed, under lining it’s fiction.

 

By exploiting the tension between the narrative and an abstract image I try to create a gap in which the viewer to fall and become apart of the work, and hopefully question the typical engagement a viewer might have with a ‘narrator’ or ‘creator’, making clear the separation between art/media/television/design.

 

I often ask the viewer questions ‘Do you find this valuable?’ ‘What is my opinion worth?’ ‘How much do you want for me?’ in order to share my vulnerability and to reduce the size of the pedestal between ‘artist’ and ‘the public’ in my work I am constantly reminding the viewer of the normality of my existence and artists existence and the fiction that is any kind of art ‘market’

 

My text is sometimes used in other forms - bunting of popular song lyrics, and placards of other people’s text messages - by allowing the viewer to engage with these objects and photographing this scene they become the missing image to the text, they become the character the story and a narrative I am yet to write, they are part of this sense of ‘creation’ of an art object, I aim for them to become as pedestaled as the ‘Art’. This allows space for the boundaries between artist and viewer, narrator and reader, self and other and between relationships and closure to be re addressed.

 

 

 

Hey, I need you to promise me something, and you can’t tell anyone I’ve told you – I’m still completely in love with Anthony and he doesn’t feel the same way and I don’t know how to get over it. So please please can you not mention him around me anymore. I miss him too much.

 

Hiya, think I just saw you down the road? I was shouting your name over and over but you must have had your head phones in..Right? Well, it’s been ages since we had that date, we should meet up soon? Anyway, bye!