I'm a material-based artist, which means first and foremost I pay attention to the material. It’s a kind of consideration that just comes with the job. When I’m approaching a new project my first thought is always, what will the clay do? How will the ideas I have in my psyche manifest in material forms? I’ve always got one corner of my mind’s eye on clay, I’m always immersed in this sticky medium, whether through thought, through performance, or through video work I’m trying to pay attention to the clay. Leaning in and focusing on the material I can feel my own humanity reaching out to this sticky substance. It is not surprising that the Latin word attention means to stretch towards. Let’s stretch towards our material roots our soil caked- foundations let us stretch and immerse ourselves in the material realm that we exist. Let's draw ourselves in the landscape whose material properties guide us, and experiential phenomenon moves us. Let’s get dirty, let’s get sticky, let’s get thick into the mud, for it's when we find ourselves saturated in materials agency and when our consciousness permeates material walls that we can connect to the interwoven nature of the universe. 

matter of principle

For millennia we have looked at geological processes as the acts of gods. Volcanoes that blocked out the sun for months, floods that swept away whole states, these actions of nature would be deemed so powerful they were actions of deities. We cast these deities with our own minds and within our image. 

Geology has always elevated materials for me. The natural processes of the planet are directed by the properties of the 98 elements that make up our world. To study geology is to study the power of materials, to appreciate it, to recognize the power of the geothermal engines below our feet and the currents of air above our heads. To recognize that this power does not extend from human-like deities but extends from matter itself, is to recognize the vitalism present within matter itself. 

We personify, we deify, but do we ever think to materialize?

Mark Makers

It’s revealing how when we most need to access our own thoughts we reach for materials. Materials have embedded themselves in our daily lives. They are a reliable foundation we have turned to to help us understand the world and understand ourselves. 

Materials have a memory, they are the archives for our conscious worlds, a matter-based data-base that we get to inscribe with our meanings and our emotions. It's through this storage that we can better access and understand our own thoughts. It's the metric of material externalisation that helps us get some clarity in our conscious life, think Diaries, think libraries;. 

Whether it's Hammurabi's code scratched into thick clay or the London stock exchange digitised onto glass rimmed magnetic disks, we have always trusted material to hold our most “valuable” thoughts. Hammurabi's code only became palpable when his clay tablets became ceramic. Only once there was permanence in the physical form of his clay tablets would there be permanence in the laws of his kingdom. A mark that remains is a thought that remains. The presence of the people who first smudge clay-baked plains may be gone, but their smudges aren’t. 

To make a mark is human. To make a mark for another, that is humanity. 

Go smudge some clay, go paint a canvas because it's when we reach for the material that we reach for one another. 

We reach to make.

We reach to reflect.

We reach to share. 

Cunieform (2021)

-raw clay