Working across writing, prints, drawing, site-specific interventions and video, in my practice I engage with low-cost, impermanent, fragile and unstable mediums and materials as a means to articulate diverse social possibilities around notions of vulnerability, privilege and power. Not-having, not-making, and not-knowing are concepts that I often use, in interplay with their opposites, to convey the ways in which my creative practice unfolds. This is a challenge which has multiple readings. With an emphasis on process – in particular, on temporality and performativity – the work reinforces my detachment from the work (the outcome). I like the fact that I neither have, nor accumulate, many things in my practice, since often by the time I start a new work the previous one has either disappeared or changed. Frequently a negotiation takes place between change and intentionality; therefore I approach art-making with an openness to the possibility of exploring minor variations or adjustments. This also means I am open to returning to a work/idea that I developed the previous week, or one that was developed twenty years ago. Equally significant is the fact that my practice emerges from long periods of non-productive activity, such as reading, walking, and listening. Not-making and not-knowing marks a shift from speaking (making) to listening. I take up listening as a key strategy of my artistic research: I am attentive to the people around me, but the singularity of the experiences on which I build the work lies in the fact that they are grounded less in seeing and more in listening. Listening is not just a matter of hearing – it involves curiosity, attention, concern. It takes time to recognise the layers of depth within things. It is only this ‘listening time’ that enables me to make emotional bonds, to go beyond the surface of things, and take part in them.
More recently, I have been deeply inspired by a feminist line of enquiry that seeks to develop an alternative approach to power that comes with weakness. My visual and textual work has been fundamentally reshaped by this dynamic, which finds strength in vulnerability. This feminist methodology provides me with an opportunity to engage with an approach which is an alternative to elitism, mastery, authoritarianism. Hence, not-making, not-having and not-knowing can also be understood as a refusal to take part in the blind (imperial and capitalistic) logic that works towards individualism, class privilege, profit, exploitation and domination.
My artistic research is characterised by a genuine desire to understand and embrace other ways of knowing.