Diacritic grid, 2023, digitally printed vinyl, glazed earthenware ceramics, moruna skin, dimensions approximately 700mm x 500mm
I make sculpture, installation, performance and moving image artworks. Materially, my work is comprised of collections of objects that are variously handmade, formed, found, re-purposed or transformed and placed into relationships with one another in exhibition contexts. This method extends to my approach towards live and moving image works that often become part of systems of fabricated and found objects, and formally combine found, devised and adapted filmic material. My artworks explicate the historical, formal, material, semiotic and political functions of materials and objects through the discourse of sculpture. Previously, my sculptural works have engaged with the economies, value and hierarchies of objects in museological and gallery display, and have acted to materialise and make spatial the belief systems and sense of faith attached to artworks and other objects such as minerals, plants and stones.
Recently, my practice has become more attentive to how artistic objects are instrumentalised to engage in the politics of nationality and ethnicity; historically and in contemporary contexts closely related to my own subjecthood. Over the past two years, my work has begun to explicitly engage with my complex and diasporic Balkan ethnicity . I have been making work that speaks to the politics of materials, specific European histories, the built environment and sculpture by engaging in in periods of intensive archive and site-specific research in the Balkan region. In 2022 and 2023 I have been engaged in a period of dedicated research concerning the archaeological site of Lepenski Vir, The Djedap Hydroelectric dam, and the region surrounding the Iron gates in Serbia towards the production of an artwork titled ‘The Iron Gates.’
My practice is driven by an artistic impulse to form, transform, utilise, make, describe and transcribe experiences using materials and objects in space. I am motivated by a compulsion to touch the world through the process of making artistic objects. I have activated touch as a way to acknowledge the agency of materials as co-constituents of my artworks, working in concert with sculptural materials and a given material’s unique agential possibilities.I consider this acknowledgement of material agency as a haptic form of language, and as a politically potent way of complicating hegemonic knowledge systems.