I am an early career South West-based artist, working across sculpture, photography, and illustration. My practice reflects upon my upbringing on Dartmoor, in rural Devon, and works to offer an insight into the lived experience of isolated rural communities and their contemporary relationships to land and place. 

 

My ongoing project ‘Ghost Stories’ is a series of visual retellings of supernatural Dartmoor tales. These stories are often the only accounts of the day-to-day life of local communities, kept alive for hundreds of years through oral storytelling. Such ghost stories are often markers for taboo topics hidden throughout history, such as treachery, betrayal and wrongdoing.

I am interested in how these stories of the past are reflected in the local culture today, and particularly how they translate for young people in modern rural contexts.

 

​​In past projects I have also explored what mythologies this generation might leave behind for people thousands of years in the future, particularly in the technological context of accelerated media consumption. I question how this will impact the allegories we pass on to future generations.

 

Using discarded materials passed down to me from my father, a Devon-based builder, I create sculptures out of non-traditional materials including plaster, tinfoil and tiling adhesive. These are intended to evoke historical artefacts whilst simultaneously using form to connect to the landscape and community. Through these material explorations I am interested in bringing together the organic and industrial, past and present, urban and rural. Alongside my sculptural works I also use photography and illustration, with the intention of telling these stories in a more expanded and immersive way.