Artist Statement
monumental yet vulnerable,
absent yet tangible,
abstract yet human,
static yet m o v i n g .
My work is a collection of sculptural forms incorporating conversational audio, kinetic installation and illumination. Abstract forms engage in a discourse using archival audio that my father recorded of my childhood, growing up from baby to adult: where memories blur, voices change, and I don’t recognise myself.
Through my joint honours degree studying Art and Theatre, my artworks have become theatrical in their scenographic presentation. I refer to scenography as the visual and technical elements that create “an evocative, sensorial, and imaginative journey”[1] in theatre as described by practitioner Abulafia. The space they occupy, like actors on a stage has always intrigued me, but taking away ‘the actor’ has enabled me to think critically about the relationships between art and theatre, gallery and stage, audience and viewer. By encapsulating these performative elements together in this dynamic installation, audience are invited to question can art perform without actors in the space?
Experiencing theatre company Punchdrunk(’s) recent performance ‘Viola’s Room’[2] altered the way I understand art and theatre. This immersive promenade performance had no actors; audience were guided round the space by scenography which performed the story through lights and audio. Experiencing this made me question practitioner Peter Brook’s theory that “a man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged”[3]. Punchdrunk(’s) approach juxtaposes Brook’s theory and inspired me to create art that can perform without actors. By allowing my sculptural forms to embody the scenography, I am giving them a character and a script to perform, demonstrating that art can perform without actors.
Artist duo DRIFT create works that are delicate natural forms, yet technological and kinetic in materiality[4]. This juxtaposition led me to experiment with withies, a strong and flexible garden cane yet often used in theatrical prop making, to create an abstracted figure. Durable yet malleable, the withies would spring away from the shape I was bending them into and sometimes splinter from their form. Though I enjoyed the theatricality of this medium, audiences read my work as a futuristic and sci-fi figure. I realised the material was obscuring the interpretation of my sculpture, so to find more subtlety, I discovered that using strands of ridgeline boning gave me control to produce intricate and complex forms, more in line with DRIFT’s works. My exploration of the new material allowed me the confidence to embrace a more abstract form where the absence of a body provided a neutral vessel, replacing the actor and performing alone.
I first understood that sculptures can ‘perform’ while static when I visited Haegue Yang’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery ‘Leap Year’[5]. The works were rich in abstraction and texture, with dynamic patterns and marks expanding across the floor, it felt like they were about to perform. Yangs work inspired me to expand performance and movement through dynamic pattern and doodle, and so the marks on my structures are a direct echo of the infant babble and chatter heard muttered in the soundscape and help to animate the forms.
A significant tool of understanding for me is Freshwater’s book ‘Theatre & Audience’. It has helped me break down the conventions of theatre and recognise that it “is not dependent upon its location in a designed building or institution”[6], allowing me to position my work unapologetically as both a hybrid of art and theatre. When creating a figurative form at the start of the year, I felt obligated to force universal nostalgia and my memories upon my art to draw viewers in. Now I have evolved my preconceptions of both art and theatre, and allow the materials themselves to take the stage and perform their own relational dynamic.
A performance and staging of a life… watch it play out.
The sculptures steal familiar identities and take on characters in the story.
Watching this show… theatrical and choreographed, yet spontaneous and unfamiliar.
The forms perform without people.
Sculpture personified.
Sculpture on stage.
Sculpture a creature,
taking on
a
life
of
its
own
.
[1] Yaron Abulafia, in What is Scenography?, by Pamela Howard (New York: Routledge, 2019), 25.
[2] Viola’s Room, Punchdrunk Ltd. The Carriage Works, May, 2024-December, 2024, Theatre.
[3] Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: Penguin, 1972), 7.
[4] Michele Robecchi, ed., DRIFT: Choreographing The Future(London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2022).
[5] Haegue Yang: Leap Year, Hayward Gallery, October 9, 2024-January 5, 2025, Exhibition.
[6]Helen Freshwater, Theatre & Audience (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2.
Figure 1. Viola’s cozy room with lights on in the immersive performance “Viola’s Room,” Punchdrunk, 2024, https://www.punchdrunk.com/work/violas-room/.
Figure 2. DRIFT: Shylight. Hayward Gallery, February 7–May 6, 2024, Exhibition. Photo: Helena Gardner.
Figure 3. DRIFT: Shylight. Hayward Gallery, February 7–May 6 2024, Exhibition. Photo: Helena Gardner.
Figure 4. Haegue Yang: Leap Year. Hayward Gallery, October 9, 2024–January 5, 2025, Exhibition. Photo: Helena Gardner.
Figure 5. Haegue Yang: Leap Year. Hayward Gallery, October 9, 2024–January 5, 2025, Exhibition. Photo: Helena Gardner.
Bibliography
Abulafia, Yaron. In What is Scenography?, by Pamela Howard, 25. New York: Routledge, 2019.
Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. London: Penguin, 1972.
Freshwater, Helen. Theatre & Audience. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Haegue Yang: Leap Year, Hayward Gallery, October 9, 2024-January 5, 2025, Exhibition.
Robecchi, Michele, ed., DRIFT: Choreographing The Future. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2022.
Viola’s Room. Punchdrunk Ltd. The Carriage Works, May, 2024-December, 2024, Theatre.