Artist Statement
My practice explores interrelated themes of connection, desire, trace and collective memory and is informed by Fiona Anderson’s writing on cruising as method - a furtive approach to research and artistic practice that embraces fascination or obsession with a subject, whilst resisting predetermined outcomes. Working in this non-linear way, I explore notions of queer time and space, ideas informed by José Esteban Muñoz’ case for stepping outside the linearity of straight time and the performance of queer utopian memory.
I typically make drawings and paintings in response to found imagery, objects and ephemera that depict or relate to the male form and which hold some significance or charge, reflecting on the potential for coded exchanges and remaining open to chance encounters, whilst invoking distant presences and lived experiences. For a number of years the point of departure for my work has been a moment in the gay experience that immediately preceded the HIV/AIDS epidemic – a moment of liberation around the late 1970s and early 1980s. Recent work looks further back, revisiting and reframing historical narratives through speculative observations, tracing certain sensibilities across time.
