I remade “Bespoke Mountain” for SCOPE art fair – continuing the focus of this piece discussing belonging and place through the materials, I built this “Bespoke Mountain 2” with the stone from the farm walls where I grew up. This added another layer, as I was in a sense building with the stuff of my childhood, making something in the present and for the future, using materials from the past.
Whilst foldgallery was closed throughout the freezing months of January to March 2008, several artists were invited to make work for the window. For this I built “Bespoke Mountain”, continuing ideas about the landscape and belonging that had permeated recent pieces. Using materials foraged from around the town: rubble, concrete, stone, supplemented with stuff from the builders merchants I created a mountain on top of a table, a sculpture growing out of its environment. The idea that I build with the materials from a location is integral, not simply to locate the sculpture to its venue, but also to locate myself.
I have just shown a Bespoke Mountain in Carlisle, part of the cultural event organised by the artists collective, freerange artists, to support the city’s bid for Capital of Culture. On the corner of Castle St. & Finkle St, opposite the castle, is a thinly bedded out planter. A tractor hood rests on the soil and getting closer, looking through the windows, a landscape of glass, wood, stone and slate and tiny people reveals itself.
I was the first year artist on the three year project called “The Watershed- Inspired by Landscape” – a Heritage Lottery funded commission to make a new body of work in response to the moorland landscape of the south pennines and to develop a new visiting audience (WLP is currently a finalist in the National Lottery Awards for best environmental project).
For This is not an Empty Space, we (myself with a group of local artists) took over one floor of an abandoned mill in Hebden Bridge. Through the combination of incongruous, dry fountains and “suitable”, living saplings, this piece continues to expolore themes of belonging, identity and sustainability.
Here is a combination of glorious and attractive carniverous plant with a hand-made spiky structure that in itself, points aggressively towards the plants soft, phallus like skin. It was shown in Temporary Artspace exhibition in Wakefield.
With “See-Thru House” we imagine the journey of the jasmine climbing through a house towards either an open velux window or a blocked perspex corridor. The perspex house was a scale model of the house we were living in London, just before moving back up to Yorkshire, in 2009. I built it for and planted … Read more
“Negotiating Structure in perspex & wood” was installed at Collyer Bristow Gallery in London – using a Spathiphyllum, peace lily, which is very good for purifying the air and adding more oxygen than most plants.
This piece was the forerunner to Roast Lamb at Wast Water and is very much a simpler version. It was made as a response to the theme of ‘Britishness?’ for a show by Another Production, at the Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2006. The intention was to have a marriage of two British icons: roast beef dinner and … Read more
My piece for Fred 2008, called “Misfit”, combines the familiar with the exotic. The bottom half being a traditional rough garden shed and the top half taking the form of a gold pagoda, this piece continues the theme of identity & fitting in, that began with last years Fred commission. The Lake District has long … Read more
“Visitor” was a series of 6 sculptures placed in the landscape at Stickle Ghyll, Great Langdale, Lake District, for the Fred art event — September 28th – October 14th, 2007. I made recognizable structures from around the world using natural, very local materials ( from a 3 metre radius of where I sat on the … Read more
This piece was made using roast lamb , the sheep had fed on the shores of Wastwater- the area depicted in the image. It was installed on the back of one of The Mountain Goat Buses which toured this areas, as part of Fred 2006 – a large art invasion across Cumbria during October. My … Read more
In October 2005 The Empire took over the iconic landscape of The Lake District, as part of Fred : an annual “art invasion across Cumbria” : supporting around 30 artists with the opportunity to make work anywhere in Cumbria. The commissioned work for Fred consists of a set of postcards featuring specific locations around Langdale … Read more
I cast body parts with food stuffs like butter, lard, aspic: including a series of mens’ bellies containing their favourite meal.
Some of my Glue sculpture (pylons and a maquette of the Sally Barker Gallery) were included in a piece by Goshka Macuga when she was a final year student on the MA Curating Contemporary Art course at the Royal College of Art.