In my work I use plants as a subject to reflect different social and economic values. I am interested in how perception and knowledge has changed with time and how this is constantly shifting and is echoed in the small details of everyday life. As I draw I imagine stories, obsessions and hypothetical futures for the subject under my magnifying glass.
The series ‘Growing stones’ and ‘Earth works’ is based on the potato, a relationship grew as I studied and watched it sprout, its multicolored branches taking unusually shaped forms. I observed and documented how these alien bodies contained themselves over many months or years, keeping a record and collecting data of the alternative world they inhabit, similarly to 16th-Century botanists, fascinated in it’s diversity and ability to survive. I researched into its complicated unwelcome introduction into European History and how eventually it was adopted and how it influenced the economic development of Northern Europe. A form of intimacy and obsession between me and my subject formed, I showed the series ‘Earth works’ circling my bed and ‘Growing stones’ are watercolour drawings the same height as myself with anthropomorphic metamorphic qualities.
I have worked with a wide range of media but now focus mainly on watercolour on paper. I love this medium for its unforgiving nature. It has a life of its own, once a mark is made it can’t be removed, the only option is to incorporate it. Connected in an abstract way to the natural world, both are evolving and unpredictable.