I’m interested in cultivating an art practice which promotes slowness and supports the well-being of my community, myself and the environment. I’m developing a practice which encourages the creation and maintenance of good habits, shifting and evolving away from unsustainable tendencies.
I’m interested in the potential of movement to process thoughts, re-establishing the body as a site equal to the mind in terms of thinking-potential. I’d like to explore rhythmic sound.
My practice at university began with walking. I process the world around me at the pace of my walk. I am curious and like to play. I like to search and find things. I feel a child-like detachment from time and reality as I explore and discover the places around me. I push through tangled branches in hedgerows to enter spaces that are unusual. I find evidence and residues of imagined and unimagined occurrences.
I gather and collect the things I find in the overgrowth - un-wanted trash talismans. What I find determines what I make.
Ivan Chtcheglov’s Formulary for a new urbanism inspired me to consider waste in terms of a mapping device. My emotions and habits are insidiously recorded in the mass of waste-stuff I generate. Waste is a symptom of our culture.
I feel naturally inclined to gather, collect and organize what I use and what I find. I want to develop and maintain systems that allow me to re-use/reclaim what I have, minimizing the waste I produce and the materials I consume. I don’t like to purchase new materials when so much already exists.
I want to make art with materials that are accessible, cheap or free. Art can be made with whatever is available. I use twigs, sweet wrappers and orange peel. I use plastic wrap from the local chippie’s food delivery. I use my mums old bed sheets. I make paper pulp with old post and used notebooks.
Merzzing is a personal understanding I’ve developed, a way to name a mass of material and a method to log and collect it. Merz is a Dada term found and created by Kurt Schwitters, derived from the German word; Kommerz – which translates as commerce. I use Merz to describe the abject mass created by capitalist-consumer habits. I’m drawn to the fragments of stuff that collect in the nooks of staircases and curbsides. Merzzing is a process of walking with the intention of looking and collecting litter and logging it by time, date and location, in order to reveal patterns, create maps and imagine narratives.
.