FIXED IT!

For me, making art is a way of responding to the social, cultural and technological conditions of the time I live in. We absorb energy, news, research, trends, and history, and through an amalgamation of these topics, laced with our own personal experiences, create artwork that reflects the time we live in.

For me, I have always been intrinsically linked to sculpture and physical space for as long as I can remember. It's how my mind operates.

As a child, I was playing with Play-Doh and fixing the computer when it wouldn't start or when the floppy disk drive wasn't working. I remember sitting underneath the desk for minutes, and sometimes hours, before calling down to my dad, "FIXED IT!" This was before technology and social media became part of my daily existence. I was part of the first generation to experience social media as a defining feature of adolescence, while still remembering a childhood before it became ubiquitous.

Technology has been omnipresent throughout my life, just as it is continuously present in today's everyday discourse. I first started experimenting with scanning technology when I was working in the film industry in 2019. The production was exploring small-scale modelling and then large-scale production through milling. I thought I should probably start experimenting myself if "this is the way the world is going to go."

I'm glad I did, because it started my fall down the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole of warped pixelated forms, distortions, and nerding out during studio visits with my friend and talented artist James Rogers, who was the one who really pushed me to start experimenting with gaming consoles.

For me, having technology as part of my practice is not a modern-day or trendy gimmick; it fundamentally defines my existence and the social conditions of the world I grew up in. I use technology because it allows me to move between physical and virtual space, and I've always understood the world spatially.

I want to be clear that it is only one of many facets of my practice. I am constantly in dialogue with the codes, pixels, and images being created, rather than handing over control to these digital entities. I see them as another form of documentation, research, and discovery, alongside nature, people, experiences, and traditional research.

My process has a flow and direction, but it is also open-ended. I am the one who decides when to scan a sculpture, when to print an image, and when to draw a mould based on my own visual language.

So yes, technology is very important to me and my work, but it's not the full picture.