RMIT, Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art – Ceramics)
Winner of the Sofitel Melbourne Exhibition in a Public Space Award: Exhibition and launch event in Sofitel Melbourne on Collins.
Winner of the Northcote Pottery Supplies Award: Exhibition and launch event at Pan Gallery.
ARTIST STATEMENT
In a world where our insatiable appetites for news and entertainment have created a market for sensationalism and the endless drone of 24 hour news channels, our culture has become a Bakhtinian carnival. Unable to distinguish reality from reality TV and war from family feud, we passively accept TV truths.
My work launches a humorous, freewheeling attack on our desensitisation to the white noise and emptiness surrounding us. Looking like a hybrid between art, machine and toy, my sculptures maintain a circus-like sense of amusement and curiosity for the viewer, all the while sending up societal norms and politics.
I like to celebrate the lavishly eccentric design of past eras and the sense of possibility it embodied. As hackneyed as it sounds, a Brave New World is upon us, stranger perhaps than our imaginations can conceive of. While my work casts a disparaging eye at the use of technology for inane and selfish reasons – from Botox to weaponry – it retains a playful, humorous edge. I am not interested in producing depressingly macabre images. Every work becomes a caricature or parody, as though the world is being viewed in a funfair’s distorted mirror.
