If we were all a little honest with ourselves, we would realise that a truly integral belief, without any ‘underside’ in which the opposite is believed, would make even the most ordinary everyday life almost impossible.” - Christian Metz.
As an artist I’m interested in what gets suppressed in the process of maintaining an ordered human society. We tend to ignore the persistence of the child through adulthood, and the continuation of the animal in us. We don’t like to acknowledge the flimsiness of the domestic structure we use to keep ourselves in line. My work examines these sorts of tensions.
My work often takes the form of a short film. Whatever the medium, the aim is to tell a story about everyday life. Our experiences are very complicated. We are dealing with a slippery sort of reality, one that is subjective, ambiguous, immersive and ongoing. I look first at relationships, particularly those which our own sense of self has an immense stake in maintaining. Parent and child, husband and wife, self and self. These relationships are very densely layered, and constantly shifting.
Storytelling depends on three assumptions: That people act with intention, that time is linear, and that it is possible to trace a clear chain of cause and effect. Genuine experience will not support these assumptions. So a lot of the time, I am looking around the edges of the story, because I want to examine closely what has been swept aside, suppressed, ignored.
