Love by Proxy Diagrammatic Drawings (18 of 52), 2020-ongoing
Materials: Tracing paper, highlighters, black ink
Dimensions: A1
The first in the ‘Love by Proxy Series’, the ‘Diagrammatic Drawings’ began in 2020, during a Data Fellowship that I was awarded by the Southwest Creative Technology Network (SWCTN).
As the Fellowship moved online, following several pandemic lockdowns, it was during this time of solitude, when I began to look for a way to process heartache, with some emotional distance.
I adapted Robert Sternberg’s psychometric model; a ‘Triangular Theorem for Love’, into a series of permutations with a visual boundary, so that shifts in thinking could be explored and slowly processed, while the heart is held to avoid it breaking.
Love by Proxy Diagrammatic Drawing (6 of 52): Breaking Away, 2020
Materials: Tracing paper, highlighters, black ink
Dimensions: A1
The ‘Love by Proxy Episode Series’ are video works that evolved during the pandemic lockdowns, when digital communication was essential for making contact. Whilst digitising the drawing series, to share them online during the lockdowns and reading ‘Vibrant Matter, 2010’, by Jane Bennett, that I began to work with the digital glow of the screen, to consider it having agency, which could affect human thinking and shape aspects of life.
In the ‘Love by Proxy Episode Series’ the focus changes from viewing the drawings as a series, side by side, to a digitised sequence that fade into one another, accompanied by an Artificial Intelligent text-to-speech voice, named Peter.
Though Peter will attempt to tune into a rhythmically curated accumulation of lyrics, poetry, facts, fiction, songs, hearsay, and the odd advertisement, his tone of voice and disjointed delivery does not always generate speech clearly or with contextual accuracy, since he appears in two minds about what he is saying and his words have a tendency to skip a beat, which leaves him swaying between the comical, the empathetic and the eerie.
Matters of the Heart & Mind Episode I, 2020
Material: Digital video
Duration: 7min 6sec
Matters of the Heart & Mind Episode II, 2021
Material: Digital video
Duration: 5min 51sec
Stratified Relations Series Exhibit A, 2020-2021
Material: Digital print on aluminium composite
Dimensions: variable
Stratified Relations Series Exhibit B, 2020-2021
Material: Digital print on aluminium composite
Dimensions: variable
The ‘Stratified Relations Series’ (above) were first produced in 2021, but I imagine this series to be ongoing until I am not around to make them anymore, since they work with sourced text, which has unlimited potential and the processing could span deep geological time.
The idea behind these artworks was first sown in 2016, when a fellow artist sent me a copy of the book ‘Reality Hunger’ by David Shields, on a hunch its fragmentary structure would appeal to the scattered nature of my work process. After reading a Guardian review of this book from 2010, the reviewer Sean O’Hagan defined it as ‘genre-blurring’, stating how it ‘questions ownership [in our] technology-driven culture’. [1] Considered controversial due to the book being a curated mix of other people’s quotes that the author used as a framework for his own reflective writing, I knew I wanted to work with it, as a material, in some way, so I included a quote, by Shields, with an accompanying reference, which is the only text that you will find in white on each of the works.
While sourcing my own series of quotes taken from poetry, literature, song lyrics, film scripts, etc, at times the process felt nourishing, since each quote referred to matters of the heart, but often it became a labour intense task, since the framework I had set for myself was to connect each quote through rhythmical word associations. On deciding to remove the quotes and use them in another Love by Proxy artwork, I increased the scale of these artworks to refer to the florescent lines left behind by my succession of quotes as a series of layered strata, which map to the colour-coded sequence of references beneath.
My final act was one of petrification, wherein, the dynamic nature of electronic publishing and hyperlinks have been solidified, leaving only image and object remaining.
We Are Only Partly Real (Night Cycle, Zone 1 & 2), 2025
Above is an installation shot taken from the virtual reality exhibition ‘We Are Only Partly Real, 2025’, in conversation with the artist Steve Dutton, commissioned by Spike Island in partnership with Stephen Gray, and funded by the University of Bristol’s AHRC Impact Acceleration Award.
‘Flex, 2017′ became part of the ‘Love by Proxy Series, 2020-ongoing’ after discovering the top and bottom edges of the light filled frames had the same shape as that used in the ‘Diagrammatic Drawing Series’.
The VR exhibition ‘We Are Only Partly Real, 2025’ had a ‘day cycle’ and a ‘night cycle’, where night becomes a version of the exhibition with a dream-like state. In the ‘night cycle’ shot (above), ‘Flex, 2017′ becomes an object of reference by channelling the florescent sequence of colours used in ‘Love by Proxy’, to consider colour as a perspective, rather than a property of a thing.
[1] O’Hagan, S. (2010, February). Reality Hunger by David Shields. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/28/reality-hunger-book-review. Source cited: 20th May, 2022
[2] Vaughan, H. Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, p5-22
[3] Sontag, S. Styles of Radical Will., London: Secker & Warburg, 1969, p1-34