2013 • room four gallery

of the matter

Of the Matter continued themes pursued in my final year of Sculpture at Canterbury University. Post the catastrophic earthquakes of 2011 onwards, we were met with an abundance of broken wood, concrete, metal and other detritus. What had once been integral within the infrastructure of the city had been demeaned and devalued and was now shipped to the dump. I chose to gather these pieces and would take them through a process of activation. First, all was lain upon the floor in a grid formation - then, I went through an intuitive process, sometimes hurried and sometimes slow, to formulate relationships between these items and allow for curiosity, recognition and reverence from us.

The focus upon the worlds broken pieces has always been an interest of mine. How we choose to live alongside and with the physical world holds so much insight into ourselves and also the big questions of this day and age. We have unconscious habits of throw away - we expect and in part help objects to have short life spans - things are devalued and these thoughts create the polluted world we live in. Conscious consideration, curiosity and value ... even if the object is broken has the power to both change our destructive behaviour and change ourselves.