The Cardsharps Photograph

I make art because I need to. Regardless of the research, politics, craft, and aesthetics which are at work in my practice, first and foremost I produce art as a means to wrestle with, and further understand, our existential purpose. The body of work I am gradually building is, therefore, a reflection of how I see the world, and how I would like to facilitate the viewer in questioning elements of life based on these reflective experiences. The overarching themes of my work concern meaning and sustainability. What we pursue from life always has a price, and the beneficial elements always produce material which ultimately, whether we are conscious of this condition or not, harms us, and if not us, then strangers in other lands, or futures, which are alien to us in our contemporary state. My pieces are an attempt to meet these strangers, to initiate conversation with the voices that we only discover through an experience which pierces the almost constantly invisible membrane that surrounds us - the distracted mode of everyday living. This is where art, when art performs at its most authentic, is the prick that bursts the perception we assume and most often know to be "˜reality'. Art stops us, grabs us, arrests us, moves us, angers, elates, frustrates, and endears us. Art summons emotions dormant in our souls, art transports us to lands our feet have never before wondered upon, art drives us to change our direction irrevocably, art references our past, present and future, transcending the fleetingly familiar details that so often constitute our daily purpose. My work is political, which is inevitable, for everything is political. Our every move, communication, relationship, and product are political - we make no decision without political motive. The degree to which we are aware of this is varied (for many, many different reasons), and this in turn defines how we then apply such knowledge. It is into the complexity of this political matrix that my art delves. It is an attempt to infiltrate that which is simultaneously familiar and secret to us. It ultimately consists of acts of reflection and subversion, gestures towards a different way of seeing, made within a culture which is so often, perhaps inevitably, blind to its own essence.