Small Person 17cm
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Recently my work has been informed by an interest in the Victorians as the first generation who chose to define nature in opposition to what is human. In a spirit of wild curiosity, tinged with fear, the Victorians idolised and idealised nature, ‘packaging’ it in highly romanticised, palatable works of art.
Our modern-day understanding is very different, so that we now interpret much Victorian art as ‘unnatural’, as contrived or kitsch.
Pursuing an interest in the history of natural history, I have looked particularly at our continually evolving theories of evolution. It was with a sometimes bluff confidence that the Victorians made enormous misinterpretations of geological evidence, in what appeals to me as a game of Chinese Whispers taking place over millennia.
My sculptures are not visitors from other worlds, but the ‘might-have-beens’ and the ‘might-be’s’ of this world. I want to assemble creatures from the strange notions of what we define as ‘nature’ and of each other as people – as ‘other’.
