I live and work in Bristol, UK.

I create sculpture, installations, animation, film, drawings and sound pieces.

I am inspired by ghost stories, subterranean worlds, victorian spiritualism, rats, maps/plans, Harry Houdini, Tove Jansson, Jan Svankmajer, Caroline Leaf, Youri Norstein, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Susan Hiller.

I am currently creating a stop motion animation 'Heirlooms', which is based on a short story by James Scott. Heirlooms is about a group of children who are haunted by the faceless ghost, Peg Prowler.

I am going to animate using a cut-out animation style, but the puppets have 3D heads and the limbs will be able to raise from the glass multiplane animation stand. I am currently creating the sets.

The voyeuristic aspect of my work may stem from a chidhood wish to gain access to restricted spaces (such as a hidden room in a dollhouse).

My work involves the frustration of being prevented from fulfilling wishes, by only allowing glimpses of these inaccessible worlds. By creating intricate, small worlds I am suggesting the desire to retreat from something threatening like society.

Yet I am also interested in the contradictions and conflict this inspires; it appears that by reducing the world to a small and repetitious environment you create a sense of safety, but perhaps all you are doing is internalizing the initial threat.

Images such as rats eating from dining room tables not only evoke feelings of disgust but of childish play. I am perhaps attempting to control fragile memories and perceptions of childhood built on cardboard foundations.

The structures I create are deliberately insecure, unsound, in order to summon up an atmoshere of unease, this is a fragile world that could topple down at any moment.

I also enjoy working with cardboard as it is often viewed as a 'poor' material, only salvaged by the dispossessed.





… Read More