As humans we are becoming increasingly de-sensitised to our surroundings as a result of the constant bombardment of sensory overload we experience within our daily lives. In response to this, I create work that encourages us to stop and reassess what and how we experience life.
I am also interested in the human condition; how you and I could go through exactly the same experience, yet actually experience something very different because our unique and individual reality is made up of the way in which we perceive.
Our reality is purely our perception.
The most effective way of challenging perception, and people’s sense of what they experience, is to create an illusion within the existing reality of the places we inhabit. These are places we take for granted and no longer notice what we hear or see. When presented with an environment that feels real, yet is in fact purely re-projected video and sound, the individual enters into a process of questioning what they have actually experienced – virtual or real?
Often site-specifically, I work directly with the space (its history, the presence of its inhabitants, past and present, the existing lighting environment and the ambient sounds) and with all these elements I create an experience that not only questions peoples’ perceived sense of reality but also makes them experience the space, its architecture, its sense of function and any emotional attachments that it may hold, in a very different way to how they would on a day-to-day basis. This ultimately creates a heightened sensory awareness of the space both for the people that work within and those who visit.
Light is intrinsic to my work; it is the medium I use to sculpt, illuminate, hide, and animate through time, effectively painting in 3 dimensional space. Within my recent work ‘Lichen’ (created with Spiral Dance Company), I captured light from the illuminated moving figure and re-projected this back onto the performance space, the animated pools of light structurally defining the performance space for each dancer to dance within. Because the light was originally captured from the dancers’ bodies, and from this the installation evolved, the dancers had already formed an association to the moving light and, as they intuitively recognised their own language of movement, an intimate duet between light and body unfolded.