Grains + Chains
In viewing this work, with your eyes walking the screen, you are carrying out an act.
As you act, perform, and confront, you are collaborating with me in thinking and therefore in making.
In return, I hope to afford you moments of time. Time for mindful reflection on the multiple social and political narratives of chains and the broader discipline contemporary art jewellery continues to play regarding our human behaviour, linked attachment and impact on environment, material, and value.
Grains + Chains, Installation at Victoria Baths, Manchester, UK, 2023Sand is the 2nd most used resource on Earth, after water, and the bedrock of human construction. But the world is running out of sand, with humans to blame. Here is a ‘chain’ of linked images and text protesting the impact of sand depletion on landscape and habitats, and other knock-on environmental effects. Formed on the skeleton of a traditional Gunter’s chain, this historic surveyor’s tool dates to around 1620 and was used to measure and plot land for legal and commercial purposes not only across the British Empire, but also the American wilderness and early settlements. Measuring 66 feet in length, it is composed of 100 links marked off into groups of 10 by brass rings or tags. It has left a permanent imprint on the way land is measured and divided in the United Kingdom and America.
Gold Grain Jewellery I, Photograph, 2022Golden grains of value
Gold Grain Jewellery II, Photograph, 2022
Our human linked connection with the temporality of space, place and matter.
Linked to Land and Sea, Photographs I - IV, 2022I walk looking at layers,
looking at layers of space created by time and by man.
A rock, a grain, a LeGuin bag; fruitfully full, or merely a hollowed smothering of something once captured. A moment perhaps.
A basket, a grid, a cage; a Deleuzian striated structure of state apparatus.
A prison of being within the verses of nomadic war machine of... smooth.
We bring, we bring, we bring from shore to shore, goods of goods, until, until the moment we find falter.
An urge to fill, an urge to strip.
An urge to place, an urge to remove.
This urge to replace nurtured within the very act of re-placing.
Yet this act doesn’t remove spaces or replace pasts. These acts are still in this space, in this moment, the moment we inhabit, the moment we make.
Layers, Verse, 2023First performed as a spoken piece, Battersea London, 2023
L-R: 1 Heals, London Design Week 2023; 2-6 Wells Maltings, Norfolk, 2024Awards for this body of work:
Green Grads Earth Prize - Anglepoise Prize; London Design Week, 2023
Design Nation Graduate Innovator Award, London Design Week, 2023