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Lucretius states in his prose Of the Nature of Things that all matter is perpetually raining down. I believe this force of substance is requiring a moment of our attention. The work is driven by an exploration of matter, played out here in the dynamic between the painted surface and made object.

 

A set of abstract encounters between humble materials are established using painted or raw, stretched or un-stretched canvas, simple fabrics, cement, and wire. This staged encounter is a function of formal decisions I make around the qualities of the raw material, colour, surface, texture, weight, scale and line. I do not overly transform these materials but rather give an allowance for balancing the interacting physical matter of them. There is a vital materiality to each object and painted surface, and in organising them into assemblage they take on a new agency together, capturing the energy of their form in new containment.

 

In Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, she discusses the participation of human and non-human forces, the interconnected moving along together of all matter, a mutual absorption in living and an ecology of difference. These ideas influence the installation of the work I make, becoming a set of conditions for holding a spatiality open, a space for attention, and claiming an aesthetic language through a poetic framework.