I studied it at the end of last century, but it wasn’t until six or seven years ago that I could really devote regular time and effort to the practice. Now I’m pretty much doing it full time.

I’ve used wood extensively for a few years. It is a universal material and comes with a sense of history or a record of a previous life. I think wood connects different cultures across time and space and suggests a confluence of past, present and future. It also has a great sense of presence as a material.

I can only source wood of about fifty mm thickness, so the pieces all need to be glued together to give me a big enough form to create a work from. Everything is hand carved and left raw after sanding. I don’t like putting finishes on the work.

Some may be natural holes in the timber, but often I will drill holes myself, forming constellations for example. They act as a way of subverting the materiality of the wood and highlight the sense of space and emptiness in the work. I tend to think of these spaces as being the active component of the work.

I work with dualities and paradox constantly. I started carving as a way of resisting the constant push of the digitized, accelerated culture. Everything was starting to turn into white noise. I wanted to work in a way that refused to deliver constant or instantaneous satisfaction. I was interested in the notion of arresting the flow of time. Through exploring contemporary concerns with an ancient process, it became a way of collapsing the distinctions of past, present and future.

As mentioned, I tend to work with polarities quite often. I find I’m more interested in something that exists on a scale between opposing states. Indeterminacy over absolutes. The hoodie can be seen as an ancient garb, as in a monk’s habit, or contemporary supermarket clothing. In either instance, it can be utilised to conceal identity. It’s a form of erasure in that sense – an erasure of identity. It also refers to seemingly contradictory states of form and formlessness, presence and absence. Silence and noise.

It’s about time and the disruption to a sense of linear flow. Glitches are a disruption to continuity that become little spaces, portals through time. They can loop back and project forward simultaneously. I’m suggesting the body exists within these temporal paradoxes, or parallaxes, constantly unfurling across differing temporal trajectories. It follows that distortions in time become distortions in space and with that, the body could be seen as a portal to the infinite.
Mute Figure #1 was very much informed by severe jet lag and a mild case of vertigo from a very long flight. I literally felt my body being pulled in different directions simultaneously and my sense of balance was seriously compromised. It was made for an exhibition in New York. It takes me a few days to adjust each time I go there.

Back when I was dabbling with animation, I created this character (Gobi), who was built around a premise of reverse enlightenment – a sort of uncontrolled, collective internet mind. A space where all information was not ordered into a logical hierarchy. It became my reworking of the Heideggerian notion of Dasein before I knew of the Heideggerian notion of Dasein, his circular, featureless face being a portal between dimensions.
They started out as watercolours and some flash animation, and then were ultimately realised as sculpture. They explore the removal of the distinction between internal and external, the fake and the real. I’ve always been taken by the Buddhist view of reality that suggests everything is real, including thought and illusion.

The themes explored with the Gobi character have continued through subsequent watercolours, Vaporous Narratives, though the character as mostly absent. The drawings suggest an alternate or remixed present based on collected narratives or experiences. I just become aware of what I’m being exposed to or subjected to, or what my attention chooses to focus on at a given moment and note it down. These notes are then transposed upon a similarly created background. The text appears as the basis of the work, yet the text isn’t really there. It is a space for the text, an emptiness. It is a narrative that must be overcome, which is a device used in meditation.
I generally do these works at the end of many months of carving as a kind of antidote to carving, so they are done very quickly and with as little decision making as possible. Fast and fluid, as though each one is a breath upon a glass that dissolves into the next.
I was reading about Buckminster Fuller at that particular time and was taken by what an extraordinarily humanistic and forward-thinking person he was. Also at the time, a new Prime Minister was elected in Australia, who was so retrogressive and vile – he wanted to drive us back deep into the dark, coal powered past. The distance between them became a starting point for the work, though the politician existed only as a veiled reference. Bucky became the avatar of Gobi for this suite of drawings.

I’ve been exploring different processes and techniques in the past few months, and I want to keep exploring disrupted figuration through casting. I’m hoping to exhibit some of them later this year. I have a few commissions in various stages as well, which will keep me busy well into 2018. There are a lot of things I want to be working on. Some carved works, some not.