I am a multidisciplinary artist who uses installation, digital collage, drawing, sculpture and film to make up playful answers to questions about knowledge, memory, and truth, suggesting humorous explanations for what the world is and why it is. I am interested in the ways that stories inform worldviews and the blurred lines between fact and fiction, irony and sincerity.

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In my work, I often mimic theater set-design in creating depth from flatness, while simultaneously examining the dichotomies of front-stage/back-stage, public/private space, and audience/performer. I choose to leave the raw materials of my work exposed, questioning what value remains when a work of art is sketchy and unformed. Here, leaving things unresolved is an acceptance of indecisiveness as an inevitable response to a postmodern world; a world of global capital, hyper-connectivity and hyper-velocity.

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I am an artist for the same reason that I tell jokes at parties, or send friends funny videos they might like: it’s a way of connecting with the people I love. By working, I am learning to trust myself and my work, and allow room for my own sense of humor and spirit to grow within it.

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“I lay on the bed with the window open to the summer night – I was as rapturously lonesome as you can be only in your mid-twenties – and I listened to the song and I was so moved I tried to communicate messages by means of telepathy to a girl who was at that moment sleeping across the city.”

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Kevin Barry, from ‘The Raingod’s Green, Dark as Passion’.

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In ‘Awaken Sleeping Heart’, I have tried to bottle up the feeling of ‘blue hour’, the period of time after the sun sets, and before night falls, when the sky takes on a deep, dark blue color. This is a period of liminality, between night and day: it offers neither the bright, exposed, honesty of the day, nor fully the dark, cloaked, interiority of the night. It is a time when we return to our homes after a day’s work, and to ourselves after being with other people. This in-between time mirrors the tension between being an individual and being a part of a network of relationships, and on a personal level the dialectical experience of interiority and exteriority: who I am to myself, and who I am to other people. It reflects the duality of craving solitude while simultaneously fearing loneliness.

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Often in the beginning of a romantic relationship, many of us do the very terrible thing where, when we don’t know very much about the other person, we use our imaginations to fill in the gaps and project a fantasy person onto the real person who is the object of our desires. They become kinder, more interesting, more interested in us. The intensity of our feelings allows us to suspend our disbelief that this other person is actually perfectly ordinary. In ‘Awaken Sleeping Heart’, I ask you to fall in love with paper, lightbulbs, and wooden boards. If you suspend your disbelief, these perfectly ordinary objects become romantic icons: paper and confetti become a night sky, a lightbulb is the moon, toy cars evoke night-time lovers.

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My work often resembles theater sets because I am interested in how the viewer might be implicated in the space. In ‘Awaken Sleeping Heart’, the space is a stage upon which you might remember the details of your own romantic epics. The night sky, the trees, and the hills represent nowhere in particular, but I hope that the universality of the ideas they evoke could speak to anyone, anywhere, at any time.