I don't want to make things which are so kind of obscure and opaque and for a
very very specific kind of our audience that can only be understood by people who've read
the right literature and know the right terminology and kind of are in the know
So something like Trompe l'oeil is french for 'trick the eye' and it's a way of working where
you get the impression that you're looking at something that's that's real
or three-dimensional. There's a degree of kind of trickery there. It's often one-to-one scale
and I find that working with something like Trompe l'oeil you already kind of engage with the viewer
in a slightly different and bodily way because the way they're made is just disappears and I think
that's a way to connect with people in a slightly different way
Just by complete accident I was in a second-hand book shop and I found
browsing a book about brussels interiors and there was some photographs of this art school;
Van Der Kelen Logelain and it was this historic school for learning decorative painting
and I just immediately ran home and Googled it and realised that it was still open and I could sign
up and study at the school. It just seemed amazing that after studying in an art school, where
you're kind of free to do whatever you like and you do get a certain amount of technical training,
but nothing like this. My classwork for Van Der Kelen, they're very important to me.
In a way they're not really artworks because they're just like exercises. We made them on paper
because we had to work quickly and we had to be able to kind of roll them up and put them away.
But they were also intended to be our portfolio when we became professional decorators.
So for me they're just like a connection to the wonderful time that I had at the school.
The six months studying there that's just so important to me. It really blew my head off
I've worked with a lot of different artists, thinkers, architects, artisans. I love to
collaborate. It's really really important to me. It's a kind of break from my own brain and just
it's really fun. It's great to see what you can do when you combine friendship and different skills
Atelier E.B - the 'e' is for Edinburgh, the 'b' is for Brussels, came out of a working relationship
and friendship with my partner Beca Lipscombe. She had a fashion label of her own for years
and we met because I modeled for her for years. It became clear that even though she was in a
different discipline, we shared some really common ethos which was to do with certain kind of ethics
about self-sufficiency, about sustainability
and having a kind of interest and honesty in your roots and kind of local history
at the moment the way that we're in a really fantastic period for kind of reconsidering
histories whether that's yeah political history design history art history fashion history
there's such an interesting like new you know feminist perspective postcolonial perspective
on material that we know already which is kind of exposing all the structures that have pushed
certain things and suppressed other things and that is being done now by such wonderful
journalists historians and i read a lot of that and i find that extremely inspiring
sometimes people bring up the fact that i work in so many different kinds of mediums and
tones and voices and i work very often with appropriation
and in a nutshell appropriation is using rather than creating something from a blank page from
taking something which already exists and by re-contextualizing it to either
draw tease out of it inherent qualities that may be hidden or to recontextualize
it to make something completely new i want to be truthful about positioning myself in a kind of
cultural stream which you have to question ideas of like original ideas anyway we all come
from a certain milieu we're all a product of our influences and so it's important for me especially
as i've kind of grown as an artist and became more aware of all those kind of the nuts and bolts of
all that and the inherent responsibility to be very honest about where those influences come from
i think it's very important to stay true to your interests and desires and make work about things
that you really feel strongly about rather than the topics that you think you should make art
about because you know serious art is about this or that and not for instance cats wearing dresses
but actually doing a drawing of a cat in a dress because it gives me a lot of pleasure
it really is very important to me so i think yeah it's important to be honest about the things which
kind of turn you on but the work is then to connect those things to a kind of broader
picture and how they how you can actually just use them as a certain
material to talk about bigger things important things it's just everything there and you just
have to kind of tease out different narratives to talk about the things that are important to you
you