I am interested in the constantly evolving hierarchies of objects, styles and cultural worth. My work engages in dialogues about display, status and value alongside narratives of possession, ownership and cultural desire. My work experiments with these constantly evolving hierarchies of objects, and the way in which objects, artefacts and art are commodified and fetishised. Related themes include the idea of value and authenticity; copies, and reproduction; cross pollination of modernist art and decorative forms; classification and museology; the role of collecting (both private and institutional), and the tools of display including the plinth, framing, and the gallery itself.

Much of my early work (‘Deconstruction Construction Manual’, ‘Plaster Casts’, and ‘Museum’) was concerned with the idea of authenticity and representation. These works presented models including the plinth, the plaster cast, the vitrine, and the miniature as a way to call into question the role of imitation and engender a dialogue about the way in which substitution effects narrative as well as concepts of value and authenticity.

These themes were later expanded through a series of virtual rooms that included digital reconstructions of interiors that no longer exist and collections that have long since been dispersed (‘Horace Walpole’s Paper House’, ‘Goncourt’s Junk Collection’, ‘Sir John Soane’s Model Room’ and ‘Andre Breton’s Collectors House’). Initially influenced by the Novel ‘Against the Grain’, in which JK Huysmans describes how the main character employs his collection to stimulate his imagination towards creating an ideal private universe or dreamworld, this series of works focused on how individual collectors use their collections and the private space of the interior to create what is essentially an ideal and illusionary universe or what Walter Benjamin called the ‘phantasmagoria of the interior’. These virtual spaces of lost and idealised worlds, poised between history and artificiality, investigated both the artificiality of value and the desire of individuals to create substitutes for the real world. These fantastic spaces reflect inner desires and fantasies.

This was followed by a series of works that continued to focus on the sphere of the collector, and by extension, the decorative interior (‘Ornamental Fantasy’, ‘Abstract Expressionist Interior’, ‘Dada Interior’, ‘Utopian Gesamtkunstwerk’). Exploring the boundaries in the hierarchy and genre of art forms: e.g., the decorative arts versus fine arts and removed from the formal signifier of modernist art (the frame), these works consist of modern paintings that have become immersed in decorative schemes that symbolise the fate of paintings to become interior fixtures or commodities of sorts.

More recent works use a historical lens and irony to show that ownership can exploit art that was once new and resisted tradition into the conservative again. These works (‘The Museum of Disruptive Decoration’) consist of porcelain cups, bowls and vases decorated with aristocratic Russian designs alongside Suprematist radical patterns that reflect how some of the plates and cups the Suprematist artists painted had originally been produced for dinner services for the Russian Tsars. Despite the dream of being revolutionary, the title suggests the redundancy of the revolutionary objects and the museums eventual and inevitable romanticization of the revolutionary ideology. Another of these works (The Commemorative Collection of Aesthetic Ideologies- Lots 1-5) cuts across and mixes two modernist styles and orthodoxies combining them into decorative elements on plates, cups and teapots, expands on this contradiction: objects lose their purpose and depth as they become relics to be sold, scattered and forgotten. 

Through an engagement with the constantly evolving hierarchies of objects and their cultural context, my work examines how desire and control fetishize art,  ultimately scrutinising the evolving role of art in culture today.