Artist statement

I work in the medium of performance and video based installation to explore the discourse and interplay between childhood and adulthood. My practice explores how we see our childhoods, and how ‘childhood’ as a concept is seen by adults. It looks at addressing, not so much, what we have lost from our childhood i.e. the fact that we are no longer children, but rather what we perceive to have lost, how we remember our childhood, how we remember the hopes and ambitions we had, and how we relive memories, shading over some aspects and exaggerating others.
I use fantasy and games in my performances, often trying to get the actor to recreate memories of their childhood, or memories of childhood games. The consequential video based installation explores the re-presentation of the performance. They show the videos, often within the space they were filmed, in order to explore how the memories of this event are recreated and how people explore the space that has been previously used to perform. My work is often light hearted and humorous. I feel that humour is a good way to explore the themes I look at, and allows the viewer to feel more comfortable aligning themselves with a time of there lives with less social boundaries and inhibitions.
In my practice I use a working hypothesis that our childhood experiences affect how we turn out as adults. It shapes our personality, outlook, norms, beliefs and values, and how we view the world. Our adult personalities then shape how we look back at our childhood, whether we exaggerate the good, and dull down the bad, or visa versa. This creates a constant cycle between what we perceive to be true, and how this perceived truth has been shape by the actual truth. It develops an interplay between reality and fantasy. There is a discourse between actual memory and perceived memory that blurs the lines of reality and fantasy, and leads as to question what we believe to be logically true.
In my most recent work, ‘These kids are crazy’, I have worked with a trained psychotherapist to conduct child based psychotherapy sessions (or play sessions) with adult actors, as if they are children. The actors were asked to act in a way that they would imagine a child to act in that situation, as oppose to acting 'like a child', as I wanted them to use there perceived memories of being a child to inform there performance. The psychotherapist was told to treat the actor as if they were literally the children she normally works with. As a result the conflicting realities contradict and undermine each other. The fantasy of the actor undermines the reality of the psychotherapist, thus turning the reality of her practice into a fantasy, whilst the reality of the psychotherapy techniques undermines the fantasy of childhood performed by the actor. The films of the performance are dubbed with myself reading the transcript of both the actor and the psychotherapist and this film is played on the wall of the set in which the original performance was filmed, creating a sense of re-presentation. However though the inevitable failure of being able to re-present something perfectly, highlights the problems of recreation and its inaccuracies, much like trying to recreate our childhood memories.
My practice explores the memory of childhood as a concept or an ideology and not childhood itself. It looks at the contradiction between true and conjecture. The medium of performance and video is a constant struggle within my work, and something that I don’t think will ever be solved. I don’t like just performing live, however I feel that showing just a video of my performance undermines that original performance. So my practice is split into two genres, performance and video based installation. Each of these are separate works, however the video of the original performance is often used in the video based installation. The splitting of my practice into these two genres means that I can further explore the theme of re-presentation.