EDUCATION
MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, 2019
BA Fine Art, Birmingham School of Art, 2013
STATEMENT
I was born the same year as the public release of the internet.
The parallel worlds of old video games and cartoons as well as the arena of online space spill over into my work. Raised on pixels, fantasy was always close and the classic characters of the 90s and 2000s have given way to the avatars and social media personae of today.
My output is the result of a ravenous consumption of media, from the high polish of MTV; the jagged polygons of early PlayStation games; YouTube videos, and the lo-fi social media posts of my online contacts. Entertainment and spectacle are key. Gloss and superficiality meet anti-capitalist critique, anxiety and a quest for a pleasurable life. I look into desire, femininity and how the internet is used as a tool of expression by women, including ideas around agency both of the individual and of digital material. Using a variety of media I contribute to the circulation of digital matter in all its excess, colour, glamour and repugnance: sometimes rapid-fire, sometimes a shifting, translucent dreamscape. I consider how the blurring between human and machine is changing experiences of womanhood, and how becoming cyborg is both a fantasy and reality, the future and the present.
Recent solo exhibitions include Electric Lady Land at Enclave Lab, London (featuring work first commissioned for the group show WE RUN THIS at BOM, Birmingham); and Now that we know the world is ending soon...what are you gonna wear? at Cheap Cheap Gallery, Birmingham. My first major solo exhibition, Taking Up Space, opened in October 2017 at Firstsite, Colchester. In 2016 I released a short film, also entitled Taking Up Space, for Channel 4's Random Acts programme. Previous shows include the touring exhibition Short Circuit (Birmingham, Venice, Copenhagen), Abandoned Margins: Policing the Black Female Body, (UICA, Grand Rapids and Woman Made Gallery, Chicago), Futura Free: A Sensing (198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, London) and the 2014 and 2015 iterations of Fierce Festival (Birmingham).