Abstract:
Familiarity, stereotypes or pre-conceived ideas often prescribe our impressions and perception. This project investigates our perception and ways of understanding reality, by exploring and questioning our social agreement on the value authenticity, physical and existences of objects. By manipulating materials that everyone has experiences of, or are familiar with, viewers are invited to reconsider the value and the power of the mundane object, and to realign our relationship to objects and their relation to the world. As objects are strangely and subtly altered, they propose alternative physical states and forms of embodiment, a type of embodiment that is dis-embodied as much as embodied, object as much as subject. Through a variety of processes, materials in the work appear or become softened, compressed, curved, rolled or bent, behaving in an unconventional manner. These qualities both awkwardly and elegantly suggest mutations and adaptations, creating perceptual confusion allowing us to explore the possibilities of the imagination also make us question what is actually real, and 'known'. Working with different materials and exploring their relationships, conflate simplicity with complexity and the mundane with the metaphysical. The materials relate to each other in different ways, ranging from a conceptual to formal relationships ones that often result in a sense of the 'inanimate' becoming animated. 'Familiar' becoming 'unfamiliar', inverting expectations and ideas about the use of everyday objects, causing us to reflect upon to thoughts such as, 'what is this we are looking at?'