al2 Sculpture

My work is an attempt to communicate, beyond the boundaries of language, something that is primal to the human condition. By combining the figurative with the abstract, my work seeks to convey a sense of disconnection between the individual human being and our accepted notions of the ‘self.’ I want to examine the nature of these different selves within our collective human experience, and to grapple with our inherent desire to be simultaneously both connected and estranged from society. Using the body as a symbol of the individual mind or soul - with it’s intrinsic sense of hope and spirituality - I wish to evoke the familiar functions that human figures have played in art across millennia as expressions of inner joy, suffering and other unnamable emotions. Though the figures in my work might be understood as universal ‘portraits’ of humanity, they represent only a fragmentary perception this idea, and like ancient figures in the art of different world cultures, are deliberately distorted in order the emphasise the un-reality of the world that they occupy. It is my hope that viewers will be able to perceive the essential feeling instilled within my work, even if the artworks themselves only function to re-create a vague semblance of this feeling. Referring to an imaginary death mask, the faces in my work are given sightless eyes that speak to my own sense of lost and wasted time, whilst also representing a blind gaze towards the unknown future and an inevitable death. By invoking gestures of anguish and distress, I have tried to manifest the maladaptive ways that I and many others have used to cope with reality, and the effects that these mechanisms can have on the body and mind. I have sought to maintain a sense of the organic in my use of materials, and to display the verisimilitude of my craft within each work of art. I have consciously diverged from mass-production, with works that represent the different unique approaches I have taken towards articulating my ideas. In accordance with this, by using found materials such as driftwood, I have sought to emphasise the role of nature in shaping, and in turn being re-shaped, by man.