My practice really started when I found boxes upon boxes of my grandparents memorabilia, I delved into their lives, piecing together their time apart during the second world war, my grandfather was a prisoner of war in Burma, and my grandmother kept the house running, whilst she waited for his return.
Finding this hidden history led me on a journey attempting to encapsulate home, domesticity and the everyday, centring around the idea of curating our own homes whilst considering factors such as place, identity, memory, nostalgia, impermanence and our own human fragility.
Home means something different to each of us. We all have a unique opinion of what and where it is, it can be a changeable and movable idea, it can be something that we each take with us or simply a fixed location or point in time.
My art practice has been an exploration of this notion of home, whether it's a safe place, a haven or a place to escape from, somewhere we can shelter or simply a place that provides us with our basic needs, a place that comforts or somewhere we can just be ourselves. Home can be so many things.
Primarily I am a collage artist, layering thoughts and ideas, gathering and reordering materials, regenerating old newspapers and magazines or hand sewing significant images and photographs into new forms. I use paper, as like us, it can be fragile yet tactile, it can hold scars and creases made with time. By hand sewing and using threads to bind these images on paper together I feel I have added some texture and made a connection to the piece, it is personal, handmade and imperfect.
My work references some of my own life experiences but is also influenced by the work and the themes within the work of Laure Provoust, Grayson Perry, Mona Hatoum, Annette Messager, Gillian Wearing, Tracey Emin and Do ho Suh to name but a few.