Private Practice Statement;
I work and live between Wirksworth, Derbyshire and Barna, West Cork. My practice is two fold, working as lead artist with the public art company, ‘Sculpture Works’ and developing my own private sculpture work.
The series of most recent sculptures [1999-2024] initially started from the journey I made from my home in England to my home in Ireland, a journey I have made for over 25 years. I was making obsevations of the ferry Journey from Holyhead to Dublin Port and realised I was positioned in the Irish sea at the halfway point. I found the notion of a ‘halfway’ point between two places both intriguing and unsettling at the same time, an in-between place, which has led me to investigate the ‘crossings’ I have been making, specifically researching ideas about ‘Home and Displacement’.
I have asked my self the question ‘Where is home’ a question that is possibly asked by the thousands of Irish travellers who take that journey year after year. and a question that is more relevant today with the migration of people from Europe and beyond combined with the refugee crisis of people from war torn countries.
This initial reference enabled me to explore references around beloning, identity and home, towards creating a series of Sculptures which give form to different narratives and stories. The Sculptures set out to establish conservations and responses to how I give meaning to my understanding of the human condition and the world we live in.
The references I work from are in part autobiographical reflecting on elements of my own history, growing up in Ireland in the 1960’s; to being adopted to living in two countries and asking the question ‘where is home’. My intention is that the work, sets out to provoke and raise questions, around subjects within a world [In my time] that has significantly changed for better or worse. I have investigated different social, political and personal histories with reference to place, landscape, heritage, immigration, conflict.
My practice is underpinned from a variety of experiences; the memory of my fathers shoe making workshop to working in residence in at the Rolls Royce Heritage Museum, Derby, to observing the traditional boat building processes used to construct heritage boats in Hegartys Boatyard, Baltimore. The ways of constructing associated with making define an honest engagement between me and the forms I want to create: the intellectual challenge within my practice is the intuitive way I work, which informs how my ideas become form and which defines a sort of inner need to realise something physical.
Process and Making are central to my sculpture practice, working in an intuitive, physically dynamic and demanding way, to develop and define my language of sculpture. I work with the medium of steel creating physical forms which begin to transcend a sense of how I can communicate different narratives.
I work most productively in my workshop following my own rules by imposing my critical and formal language on different types of steel; responding to the engineering properties of the material, I question the material, a sort of physical conversation with its properties of line, volume, weight, fluidity, surface, hardness and softness. I try to create sculpture which concerns itself with juxtapositions, tensions, elevations, constructs, opposites, balance, imbalance; all formal ingredients which inform how and what I create and which defines what I am trying to communicate, a dialogue between form, idea and image.
Referring to a range of source elements such as domestic furniture, tools, maps, architectural sites, selected writings, I work from images, which can be made from the material of steel. They begin to have their own identity, [a ladder, a chair, a house, a journey line, a boulder, a shovel] the material now has a form. Working with different constructional processes I begin to juxtapose some of these elements to create a type of ‘tension’ between different forms. This sets up a dialogue towards communicating scenarios of opposites, such as stable and unstable, comfortable, and uncomfortable, real and unreal, seen and unseen, each of these scenarios tries to address emotions of loss, sadness and longing.
For example the Boulder form is a central element within some of the sculptures, it has come from my explorations of the limestone quarries in Wirksworth, Derbyshire and through journeys [by kayak and cycling] of the ‘edge’ of the West Cork coastline, which is both permanent and temporary, solid, and fragmented.
I would hope that the series of individual works I have made begin to engage the viewer through the articulation of form and imagery, in a formal visual language; which transcends itself into self contained sculptural objects, constructed within the traditions of the language and making of sculpture.
The production of the work is a very real, thoughtful and physical activity; it provides me with a connection with the world around me through the ideas and forms I work with. I believe my work through its strength of form combined with my ability to make, sets up challenges to explore different narratives I have chosen to communicate.
