Concrete and Glass
Barcelona Residency, 2018
These small pieces – sketches that will inform larger works – were created during a during a 2018 residency in Barcelona with Andre Martus, assisting him with some new large-scale works while developing my own practice. They embody ideas that are at the core of all my work, expressed in relatively unfamiliar materials.
I am interested in the tension between the external and the internal, the realities of being human in a contemporary world. Every day we are enveloped in complexity – visual saturation, unbroken noise, relentless commodification, the inexorable routines and requirements of society. Modern life exhorts us to meet its standards, an all-consuming task that leaves little time to reconcile and reflect.
Yet we are individuals, each of us with our own internal life, quiet and deep, far removed from the tumult surrounding us. This is the dilemma: amidst all the urgency and clamour, how do we recognise and empower our human need to be authentic and vulnerable?
I chose to explore these ideas by working in glass and concrete , materials which manifest the dichotomy between fragility and immutability.
Glass because it is so easily damaged but even when shattered it is eternal. It is transparent but it isolates. It is the product of industry and technology, yet it is as delicate as anything in the natural world. And cement because it is rigid. It can be shaped but, once complete, it welds its disparate elements into something hard and impenetrable.
Here, all these disparate qualities co-exist, as they do in life.