Home is Where the Earth Is.
Raised on the family brick-and-rooftile factory and trained as an architect, I have forged an intimate relationship with industry, manufacturing, the earth, and the built environment for over three decades. As such my art and design work are born of a curious understanding of materials and fabrication, and are shaped by an intuitive sense for forms at once natural and human made, wild and restrained, organic forms but also engineered geometries celebrating precision and mechanical detailing using gestalt principles to suggest function and meaning. My practice is built on this unique and unusual blend of manufacturing prowess, an understanding of supply chains, business and markets, craft, labour and IP, and most crucially an undercurrent of playful experimentation and de-skilled artisinal approach that focuses on the interception of industrial assembly lines to generate innovative processes and novel material, surfaces and forms… The result is a primitive-futuristic, suggestively dystopian visual grammar and formal language no doubt inherited from the marvelous (and oftentimes treacherous) manufactured landscapes of my youth.
While studying to become an architect, I trained as an apprentice with the late dame Zaha Hadid in London. Here, the lens on constrained design was shattered, forms were liberated, and dynamic surging energy unleashed through objects and the now-fluid built environment. This inter-disciplinary praxis nurtured an adaptable and trans-scalar way of thinking. My work is inspired by the daring and expansive world building methodologies of visionaries like Zaha and Lebbeus Woods, and is informed by themes of landscape and geology, cosmochemistry, tectonics, ruin, artifact and heirlooms, evolution and emergent properties, type-specimens, chaos and order, swarms and fields, self-organizing systems, creation and extinction myths, object-thing theory, quantum mechanics, the nature of time, the threshold of infinity, and a nostalgia for a time not yet lived. These themes come together as an organizing principle in my research and practice, to help probe and explore the formless world and conjure superpositions of formal possibilities and experiential states within each work.
The worldbuildling nature of my practice draws on multiple streams of inspiration and speculation, and even obsessive accumulations and iterations in assemblage of objects, off-cuts, shards and fragments…. altogether these curious examinations of materials and their means of production, processing, and interoperability has come to define a broader investigation which began in my youth on the grounds of the factory and has since evolved into an unbound, anti-disciplinary and experimental practice that could be described as an archaeology of the imagination and a taxonomy of the earth and machine.
