Influenced by my surroundings; rather than being defined by a particular medium, my work considers the Japanese notion of ‘mono no aware’ or ‘the pathos of things’. Drawing upon all the available resources around me I am very much inspired by the buildings and people living on the islands in the Seto Inland Sea, Japan, where I live.
My need to form arrangements, patterns and to consider combinations or links with what can be freely obtained underscores my practice. This approach incorporates forms of inventive improvisation. Working through the passage of time and the chaotic, fragmentary nature of the everyday, I sense repetition and so I seek the feeling of mark making.
Through sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, installation and more recently working with the land, I reveal a close and constant engagement with the material world, immersing myself in an ongoing re-construction and transformation of the personal and the collective.
This act of engaging with reality, of what is understood as real, presents certain possibilities – the problem and the solution, cause and effect, an understanding of forces both light and dark, the awareness of constant change. Subsequently, my work is contemplative, these are arrangements (of islands; islands within islands) that reflect on our human condition, considering this Japanese notion of ‘mono no aware’ or ‘the pathos of things’. Ultimately, I am enjoying the processes of salvaging, reshaping, reconstructing, repeating, revealing.
