More and more we find ourselves living our lives in fast forward, finding little time to catch a breath. Busy lives leave less time for a pause and free time comes at a premium.
My work is a thoughtful pause to the mayhem that surrounds everyone and everything. I collect, review and recycle; choosing to work with materials that I find close to hand. Inspired by the ancient Japanese philosophy of Wabi-Sabi [1], I embrace the imperfect.
I like to work in a playful and spontaneous manner; this allows me to encounter a multitude of possibilities through my moments of nothingness [2]; creating "stuff" that exist as evidence of the moments process, always in a state of flux, awaiting new fragments and forever expanding like a rhizome [3].
[1] Wabi-Sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional. (Koren, L. (2008). Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers: California, U.S.A. Imperfect Publishing, 7).
[2] Nothingness: a state where nothing is present, or where nothing exists that is important or gives meaning to life (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/nothingness).
"For man to be able to question, he must be capable of being his own nothingness: that is, he can be at the origin of non-being in being only if his being-—in himself and by himself—is paralyzed with nothingness" (Barnes, H. (2003). Jean-Paul Sartre: Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel Barnes. Oxon, UK: Routledge Classics, 69).
[3] Rhizome: a botanical concept that was developed by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book; 'A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia'. In the book they state that; 'a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo', instead it favours a nomadic system of growth and propagation (Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. (2005). A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Translation and Forward by Brian Massumi.11thed. London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 25).