I have always
made objects, piecing together disregarded things, as a child
taking inspiration from the natural world: twigs, petals, leaves,
seeds, earth, cloth, bones and wire, making dolls and figures,
forming collections. The psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell once wrote
about my work, saying that ‘like a child’s intense and
concentrated play, it emerges from the place where the hands and
the mind’s imaginings are indistinguishable’.
I cannot say
that it is always like that but that is what I aim for, part
playing, part working, feeling the continual tension between form
and meaning. This is especially so since I use so many historic or
meaningful documents. I like to imagine the origins of what I find
and its now possibly redundant earlier function or value. While
cutting, tearing or placing papers, I find myself drawn into the
fugitive histories of the written word, as in an unremarkable
postcard from an English seaside resort before the first war
inscribed ‘it is grand here’, or more poignantly in a letter
written in 1932 by a mother in Berlin to a child sent to the
country: ‘the little tree is heavy with peaches’. The date on
a postmark can say so much; official stamps commemorate
significant events or mark a more sinister purpose; postcards
depict places now destroyed by bombs or re-development.
A faded blue
envelope from Paris in 1950; a pale sepia 1928 magazine from
Russia; the dense yellow sugar paper wrapping from an Italian cake
— in my work I try to transform such elements, and from their
disparate turbulence I try to make a stillness, sometimes
narrative, occasionally abstract, allowing the colour of the
papers to create unfamiliar landscapes and new kingdoms. In an
essay to accompany a past exhibition of my collages, the poet
Jehane Markham wrote: ‘A quality of quietness and calm pervades
these works. Sometimes they are about a specific place, at other
times they are more abstract, calling up references to dreams,
memories and ways of childhood. Part homage, part description,
part journal, part invention, these subtle works of art are
informed by the richly divergent life of the artist who is
intensely alive to the impulse of life and its brevity’.
