My work is concerned with salvaging the discarded: engaging with objects that are seen as utilitarian or rubbish and making them beautiful. This beauty is bittersweet: there is joy and pleasure, but also a sense of ephemerality and eventual decay or loss. My work has themes of outsider identities, (in)visibility, transience and loss, alongside randomness. My work process involves a playful exploration of processes, and of materials or collected objects, within defined constraints. I work (with my own or others) inadvertent collections, found and discarded objects. I play with flatness and three dimensions, and framing. My installations are painterly; flat paper moves into space, frames are broken and cover images. I use photographs to look at my work, to document transformations and juxtapositions. These get reabsorbed into the work, or become a regeneration and stand separately.
Elements of randomness are important in several ways in my work. I often work with algorithms or constraints and therefore do not have control over the outcomes of the process. The importance of randomness is included in my interactive projects, where others have been asked to respond to a constraint such as organising the contents of their pockets for me to photograph. Sometimes my concern is the randomness itself, for example ‘dots and lines’ where I have used a random number generator to generate paths of dots on tape. As throughout my work, there is an underlying theme of the fragility of existence and the passage of time.