A personal letter from the artist:
Friends of mine will hear me describe my work as ‘fish propaganda.’ Whilst I hesitate to use that phrasing in a more professional environment, it does effectively summarise how my work outwardly appears. It’s colourful, humorous but emotional, it’s a vessel for me to display my climate change related anxieties, and most importantly, it’s the manifestation of my reverence for sea creatures.
I work in a variety of mediums: coloured pencils, digital zines, and textile-based sculpture predominantly – distinctions between materials aren’t important to me, it all feels like performance-based artmaking. The rise of immersive art experiences such as ‘Immersive Van Gogh’ has been very interesting to me and my work; the never-ending commodities combined with the rise of Davenport and Beck’s ‘attention economy’ and Debord’s concept of ‘spectacle’ becoming more and more prevalent. At the moment I am against the rise of immersive art, however, I find the conversations it creates fascinating. Specifically, I am interested in the place immersive art has in the art-world when it is not created purely for profit. This is the gap I am filling with my art – to me, my art is made up of non-commodified and less technical immersive experiences.
The main consistency in my art is that I use marine life, primarily fish, as subject matter; another is the repeated use of the Christian God in text.My parents raised men and my brother non-religious and I’ve always been able to view religion, specifically Christianity, from an objective lens. I find Catholicism and the use of icons particularly fascinating: how does humanity attempt to portray a being who encompasses everything that ever was and everything that will ever be? I propose the answer is fish, I propose that the fish itself that Jesus used to feed around 5000 people is God. My idea of the perfect God is that He is in everything: He is my mother, He is the tallest tree in the forest, He is the shortest tree in the forest, He is a fish.