Tangling Threads Together

I am Scottish, born in Dundee. I grew up in a small town, Kirriemuir which had (and still has) a population of about 6000 people. For the first 18 years of my life I lived in a council flat with my parents and older sister. Our parents were hard workers. I learnt about equality and politics from my father, and about empathy from my mother. Doses of humour and heated discussion seemed to make equal appearances in my childhood. My father had two jobs and my mother worked for the local farmers picking berries, daffodils and tulips, carrots, potatoes and everything else grown in the fertile Strathmore Valley surrounding the town. My Mum, Grace, knitted, crocheted and was a dressmaker – a creative thinker, always making something. It was probably her playful approach to invention that influenced my sister and I both to go to art school. I left Kirriemuir when I was 18 to study for my degree and postgraduate qualifications at Glasgow School of Art after which I moved to Aotearoa New Zealand, supposedly for 3 years. And then I stayed! I call Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland home. I also still call Scotland home.

I make work in a number of different mediums ranging from analogue drawing and collage to digital print and moving image projections. Recently I have been commissioned to create some large scale public digital print murals/installations in construction and or public urban areas in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I also love creating assemblages and small sculpture. Having originally trained in the Department of Embroidered and Woven Textiles at Glasgow School of Art, my predilection is to approach making with a kaupapa based in bringing threads together. Those might be threads of ideas, actual materials, or organising fabrication of a tangible or non-tangible artwork. I work in an additive way, often assembling, compositing or building imagery, objects or sound, light or moving images. My approach to construction is one of stitching and weaving, whatever the medium - even wood and or digital files. It’s how I imagine it in my head, how I achieve a fairly organic flow by first embracing some kind of order, then mucking it up; and then developing the process. A bricoleur who tangles threads together. While I haven’t worked on my loom for a long time, weaving as a conceptual framework is core to my approach and influences.

I’ve been practicing art for over thirty years and while the outputs are varied in media and form, the overall concept always somehow explores intersections between weave, architecture or the build environment and human form or presence. I do this work because I want to extend my understanding of emotional, psychological, physical and formal experiences of spatial relationships and frameworks; to respond to humans’ impact in the built environment; and to back visual practice as a significant communication platform in current cultural, political and social environments. Primary research in my immediate surroundings drives a lot of my recent photographic work, using my camera as a drawing tool to document change in my local urban environment. I tend to observe frameworks and systems. I also work with a large library of photographic imagery shot all over the world. 

Sometimes I like to make work that sits in one discipline or area of visual practice and culture but mimics another, instinctively wanting to jump between boundaries and genres. I am influenced by looking really broadly at other artforms and sites. For example, a piece of contemporary dance or theatre, or a film might be just as inspiring to me as visiting an art exhibition, as might be a tour shooting images in a demolition site or taking in the vastness and the magic of Tongariro National Park. As my artwork and thinking progresses I feel compelled to play and experiment with materials but also to make less ‘stuff’; or to make by upcycling, or reworking pieces, chopping things up and reassembling. Regeneration, reiteration and reverberation in varying forms have always played an important part in my processing ideas and visual language – a dance of elements finding structure. A lot of my recent outputs remain as digitally woven constructions to be printed on demand, or projected as part of moving imagery as a way to keep creating, but doing so responsibly and with freedom.

My creative process has no beginning and no end – it’s a rolling thing. I often work in a regenerative framework or model of making – a kind of open ended or loose structure where documentation or critique of one work can become material for the next. Moving things around in space (digital or real space) is an important part of processing ideas. In some projects I have a more structured flow. I might gather research (imagery and other research), document beginning inquiries or observations and then make a series of experiments that have images, materials and objects collide to see how and or what creates tension and balance. I like to work with contradiction and contrast.