Other media

Disclosing otherness

Glass, card, wood and wool all begin to have a similar language when we put them together in a search for something more holy than our common sight. A change of material can literally enable a change of mind set, force us to look again at what we before understood to be a pane of glass of a broken stick and frees us up to say ‘what if?’ instead of ‘I know’. It is refreshing to handle mixed media as though it were a strange material from another universe and you are the scientist, artist challenged with the task of uncovering its real use, its real becoming.

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Homelessness: The Invisible Ones

Our world comes starkly into view with many people striving to be seen, to be helped, to be safe, be that refugees being bombed out of their homes, children being left alone and unloved or the elderly being ignored looking out vacant windows.

We live in a world that affords us the choice of not looking at those very often in front of us that may as well be invisible, the homeless.

Even in the cruellest of frozen days we might walk on and choose not to see the obvious hand out or broken plea. We freeze out those that could so easily be our sons, our family, ourselves.

“There is only one who is perfect here, and it is none of us” – Anon

Choosing the most appropriate media for expressing the plight of the homeless was not straightforward. I wanted to capture a predicament that was by its very nature brittle. I chose to work on glass as a statement to support both the ‘invisibility’ of the subject matter and the fragility of glass that could break at any moment. Glass is by nature cold and difficult to work with and so I had to work through a process of colour sketching becoming a series of transfers that got fixed to the surface of glass rendering the images much colder, bleaker and more breakable than on the warmth of paper.
Finally I fixed the glass plates into blocks at ground level to resonate with where the homeless tend to sit and each piece reminiscent of a grave stone for obvious reasons.