ARTIST, WRITER, PERFORMER.
Sept 2019 Msc Psychological Science, Queens University Belfast
2015-18 BA (Hons) Fine Art, Goldsmiths - First Class Honours
2014-15 Foundation Diploma, Central Saint Martins - Distinction
'My work strives to create a language for both autobiographical and collective episodes of psychological or physical trauma. These languages are created through the use of diagrams, metaphor and exaggeration. They begin as writing, which lies at the foundation of my practice, such as notes written whilst I lie on my mothers carpet, leaking. Nonsensical diagrams that attempt to pinpoint the dynamics of a doctors appointment I had long ago, or attempt to link the way my father takes his tie off with his succeeding mood.
The writing then takes form, if only momentarily, as installation, performance and film, before returning again to the written form as documentation.
This embodiment of my written work is often both episodic and durational in nature. The individual works have become a larger series of tableaus, with an unknown end point. Everything is drawn out, a story takes a year to tell, a conversation with my mother recreated for days, a single gesture held for hours.
Aesthetically the works utilises the visual framework of a number of institutions, particularly medical, schooling and agricultural. These are spaces of care and of management, but also of hierarchy and humiliation. Their interiors are often designed to be comforting, a cushioned surface, a brightly coloured floor. And yet psychologically they often become triggering, evoking a feeling of uncanniness in the viewer. Surreal and yet strangely familiar, alike to a mountain range on the moon. Something isn’t quite right.
Through the use of strictly controlled interiors, wipeable seats, children’s dresses and painful, enduring performances I have become the curator of my own embarrassment. A fabricated humiliation that takes form as sculptural performance spaces which, through excess, endeavour to heal the broken body. And yet they seemingly fail. The cycle begins again.'
Current Projects:
May 2019 Elise Guillaume : The Driest Place on Earth, Testbed1, London (Curator)
Past Projects:
2019 a place that fosters us, De Pimlico Project, London
2018 Docile Bodies | Preview with Performances and Screening, Vitrine Gallery, London
2018 Goldsmiths BA Fine Art Degree Show, Goldsmiths University, London
2017 Performance Auction, The New Shoreditch Theatre, London (Artist and Curator)
2017 Between Flesh and Fish, The New Shoreditch Theatre, London
2017 Objects In The Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear , Lewisham Art House, London
2017 Orientating Realities, Goldsmiths University, London
2016 The Thames Whale Memorial March, Public Spaces, London
2015 Foundation Show, Central Saint Martins, London
Performances with Other Artists:
2019 Porosity (by Michelle Williams Gamaker and Julia Kouneski), All About You at The Koppel Project, London
2017 Women Looking Bored Holding Photos of Women Looking Bored (by Emily Perry), Unfiltered Episode II at Enclave, London
2017 Felt / The Seventh of May Two Thousand and Eight etc. Old Kent Road Studios, London
2017 Fox Rain : 狐雨 (by Noe Yamakawa) Goldsmiths BA Degree Show, London
2017 Water Lettuce (by Adam and Ben Wells) Goldsmiths BA Degree Show, London