This project first arose from an interest in theoretical sensational encounters with sculpture, and what might come of making sculpture through investigating its natural relationality to the body and the senses. As parallel research to these ideas, I found interest in theory related to 'imagined' touch and the ways in which sculpture can ignite experiences and sensations of touch and the haptic through other senses such as sight. This led to further research into other subjective and experiential cognitive processes that influence the way we perceive sculptures and objects more generally; processes such as memory, imagination and dreaming. I comprehended these ideas as acknowledging where real meets unreal; where creative meets literal; where what we conventionally understand about an object might mingle with other subjective perceptual experiences and qualia of that object. As I was making, other conceptual realisations of the work were revealed to me. The sculptural forms I was ending up with felt like artefacts that you might find in a natural geological site, or perhaps in a deep-sea reef, or perhaps on an imagined alien planet, or perhaps in a dream. They felt foreign and yet closely related to the body. They felt like they could only have been made up in the creative imagination of the human mind and yet also felt completely alien and otherworldly. I was intrigued by this phenomenon and lent into it in further research. I began investigating symbols that represent the mystical, strange, foreign and ‘non-human’, such as the spiral and the star. I saw this investigation as synonymous with the research I had done on subjective sensational perception, iconographies relating to the quest to define self and other, and how the worlds in our heads mingle, reflect and interchange with the external physical world. Please note: these sculptures are designed to be touched/ held/ worn/ wrapped around the body/ experienced in physical space.

i look at a sculpture and i see a snail, 2021  

fabrics, paper mache clay, steel wire, chain, pvc, acrylic, water-colour

dimensions variable

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