On my practice

My practice takes direction from Modernist principles – with a strong focus on the formal elements, (such as line, shape, and colour), abstraction and the use of grids. Typically I make screen prints and wall based installations, which inter-relate.

As part of my creative process I intentionally use chance and accident, which means that the works are not fully pre-determined. Often chance and accident disrupt the works and send them into new directions.

Photography and drawing are also part of my practice.

On my Degree Show works

In the final year of my Fine Art degree my work took a major shift – from being purely concerned with the formal elements, to works with a strong social and political content. Much of the years’ work evolved through my wrestles with the ethical dilemmas arising from modern medicine. Their confrontational intention and use of symbols moved my works away from pure Modernism towards Postmodernism.

Primum non nocere#1, made after my elderly father died, explores control versus chance in the crucial matter of death. It draws attention to the ultimate control that medicine now has over our lives, with its extraordinary ability to extend life – and my discomfort with that. The use of appealing ‘pop’ colours is a deceit to draw the viewer in to a subject which is actually deeply disturbing. Although Postmodern in its scepticism, my aesthetic choices continue to be directed by Modernism – the use of simple colours, grid formations, and pared down, minimalism. By setting images of medication in a Modernist frame of reference my works ask the question ‘Is such progress in medicine actually delivering the utopian ideals?’ ‘Is prolonging life through medication really giving a better human experience – or resulting just in prolonged suffering?’

The series goes on to work with the symbols and language of medication. The screen prints Primum non nocere #2, although appearing abstract, faithfully replicate the braille on medication packages. Turning this tactile code into a purely visual pattern means that it now makes no sense to anyone – a nihilistic inversion.

The works become increasingly confrontational. Primum non nocere #3 and the video piece Primum non nocere #4 set out to disrupt the regimes of medication systems. Too Much too Many is another provocation piece that presents the suffocating effect of medication and then anarchically obliterates it.

Continuing to examine the language of medication Primum non nocere – Wall Installation further explodes the braille’s scale. Elevated to the foreground it is however incomprehensible – communication that isn’t communication – like the pharmaceutical information we’re given but cannot really understand. Using the appealing pastel colours of medication packaging, designed to lull us into acquiescence, it draws attention to the deeply problematic result of long-term medication – passivity and dependency.  

Extracting the symbols of the pharmaceutical industry the prints Can’t You See That Less Is More? distil medical boxes into extreme abstraction. Like Gary Hume’s hospital doors paintings they combine modernist minimalism with narrative content.

The degree show exhibition pieces Primum non nocere #5 (a wall-based installation) and Primum non nocere #6 (two video pieces) make this interrogation of modern medicine increasingly confrontational. Alarm colours highlight the dangers of passive acquiescence. In the videos an ordered layout of medication becomes gradually disrupted, ending in violent destruction. An angry response to the reality that the idealist ‘modernist’ aims of medicine – to improve life – can now result in the opposite.

Wanting to open up my practice from tight, formal investigations I have experimented with allowing chance to determine aspects of the works. I then reintroduce control and structure making deliberate choices such as colours, scale and presentation. That interplay between control and chance in the creative process really interests me. I take inspiration from several artists who embrace chance, such as John Baldessari, Dora Maurer, Karla Black and Chantel Akerman.  For Fourteen Stops an uncomposed photograph was taken at every bus stop on a journey in London, drawing on Akerman’s film News from Home (1976). Exploring chance has raised some interesting questions. Is any work of art truly made by chance? (is it ever possible to exclude artists’ choices?), and the converse – are we ever really in control?