1. When initiating a piece or body of work how do you determine the materials you will use?
Predominately by chance. I tend to have a rough idea or concept that I'm aiming for, and I'll spot something that fits with it and I can then work with, which often then moves off on a tangent. I tend to have a lot of objects lying around the studio that I've found interesting, which eventually find use as part of something later down the line. A lot of the sound work I do is based around my own voice, but the same method applies. I'll come across a sound, or vocal technique that eventually bleeds into something else that I've been looking into.
2. dO THE MATERIALS THAT YOU USE HAVE A VALUE IN THEMSELVES OR ARE THEY JUST A MEANS TO AN END?
I think the materials have an intrinsic value in what I do. It's usually the quality of the material or sound that sets up the piece, whether it be due to the fact that it resembles hide, or the associations that we ascribe to things like keys for example. The material presents a large part of meaning that I then embellish with how I use it or set it up within the space.
3. please could you discuss any correlation between ideology and materials in your practice
I work a lot around ideas of the ‘sublime’, particularly in relation to the ‘profound’. To this end I draw a lot of links to fetishes and idols, as well as sacred environments or sounds. In a lot of these cases objects, or artefacts, are composed of a certain material because the material itself has significance. So, in making work that tries to engineer or convey these situations, material becomes important, and can often form the work with very little alteration.
4. do you consider what you materials might look like in the future, or are you just thinking about how they look when you use them? for example, do you consider whether the materials might change?
I don't make much of a conscious effort to ensure permanence in what I make, as a lot of it is based around situation or environment and as such often needs to be re-engineered or re-interpreted with each space. There's also something quite satisfying about the idea of a worn or eroded relic that still retains is power, or perhaps gains more potency from that sign of its age.
5. are your materials significant in how you identify yourself as an artist?
Maybe not deliberately so, in that I don't necessarily feel tied to a specific kind of material as part of my work. Though perhaps there is a link to the materiality itself being important in conveying meaning. Having said that, I'm beginning to work into electronics, which I see as being more hidden, making that side of materials less important, though perhaps that serves to lend more importance to the presence of material they are hidden within…