Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?

I did a BA in Fine Art at the Slade followed by an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College. Except for a year in Rome and a few months in Paris I’ve always lived in London but I’m always talking about leaving.

Your stage-like installations and works are inherently performative and mix a variety of rich spiritual references in a way that is still playful and non-didactic. Could you talk a bit about these references and what drew you to your subject matter? 

Like most children I loved fairytales and myths and lucky charms. I grew up in the late 80s and 90s, well after the New Age heyday but a lot of the paraphernalia surrounding it was circulating in pop culture. There was a shop by my school where we would buy mood rings and crystals and Mystic Meg was on the National Lottery programme! So I was surrounded by quite a broad notion of spirituality and maybe as a result I’ve always been really fascinated by how esoteric objects are animated by us physically and in the mind how we perceive meaning in them. My sculptural works are representations of the process of interpreting the material world particularly artefacts and how they might symbolises and promise something like luck but don’t provide any clue as to how it might do this thing. For example in Vernacular History of the Golden Rhubarb (2017) all the sculptures were made to describe the way the artefacts in Rome are used by a tourists for wishes and lucky charms or to reveal their true selves. I think of what I’m doing as mapping a philosophical journey through the world of stuff. I suppose my work is playful perhaps because what it is dealing with is absurdity. The candy colours also make it playful and animate the stationary works. I think of my works as caricatures – a reduced form of an idea or representation which in it’s reduction gets closer to a true depiction. By using a language of approximations my sculptures often become emblematic. In general I think emblems can seem esoteric and have a kind of pseudo spirituality imbued into them because they are so confusing and self-assured.