Lost Gestures
2025, plaster, acrylic paint
These small sculptures explore how touch and gesture hold meaning separate to the spoken or written word. The idea of touch can bring a sense of longing, or a fear of contagion. Familiar hand movements are distorted, just as nostalgia bends our recollections into warped and simplistic reconstructions. Repositioning the sculptures can change their demeanor and evoke a different response. In their strangeness, they reflect the unsettling subjectivity of the stories we tell ourselves about our personal and shared histories
Exhibited in Tenfold small works exhibition
Shape of Anxiety
2022, wool, wood, wire,16cm×12cm×20cm
Shape of Anxiety was made in February and March 2022 following the peak of the COVID19 pandemic in Brisbane and as floodwaters receded, leaving a toxic blanket of brown. The work is a physical embodiment evoked by the therapist’s instruction to “visualise the shape and colour of the feeling inside your body”. The collective anxiety is reduced and personalised. The wood protrusions were whittled from a single stick and the form built with layers of merino wool, blended and needle felted over an armature. The creative process is therapeutic, and the work itself connects to therapy, nature and isolation.
Exhibited in Wangaratta Art Gallery, Petite Miniature Textiles Competition 2022
Rise and Reach
2022, wool, plastic doll arms, wire, 17cmx10cmx25cm
Rise and Reach was inspired by the fortune and triumph of finding a bucket of old faded doll parts at a garage sale. The work was an experiment in colour and weight, and gradually developed a personality over hours absorbed in podcasts. Discarded arms were reborn into a pupa, reaching out in a gesture of naïve wanting. The work expresses movement, bringing possibility and hope. Merino wool was needle felted over a wire armature holding the arms and spine in position. Nubs of wool provided structural detail, secured by wool layers and accentuated with focussed stabbing.
Exhibited in Wangaratta Art Gallery, Petite Miniature Textiles Competition 2022
