Inspired by seveal decades working in West End and Broadway theatre and created on a manual typewriter, HELLO MY NAME IS... takes a generic style of introduction as the starting point for thinking about identity, not as inherited or acquired, but as a never-ending, always incomplete, unfinished and open-ended activity.
As we grapple with the insecurities and uncertainty of our increasingly fragmented and fluid era, our identities are undergoing a process of continual transformation. Surrounded by constant change and disposability, our identities have become transient and deeply elusive - and so the question of identity has changed from something you are born with into an act of creation, something invented not inherited...like a stage name or pseudonym.
Hello... are made with a manual typewriter, using a loose set of predetermined parameters and repetitive actions to upend more traditional compositional strategies and subjective decision-making, strategies that support an intensive exploration of the physical and material aspects of artistic production. Although operating within controls and parameters, the nature of the (aged) equipment and process opens up the potential for accident and facilitates unpredictable results.
Exploring the idea that a single mark can articulate and alter the understanding of the ground itself - an idea implicit in every day of lived experience - the work embraces both repetition and the paradigm of polar opposition as a means to suggest variation as well as the process of transformation.
By employing layered repetitions - repeated motifs, repeated keystrokes and repetitive actions of making - the work not only suggests transformation, but embodies that process. In practical application repetition is experienced not as something finite, but a productive process that generates variation in and through every repetition.
Exploiting the creative friction between opposing qualities, formal elements of clarity, balance and harmony are activated by a more personal, disruptive energy generating a sense of emotional tension in the work. These emotional undertones are underscored by the choice of circle as a central motif, which in this context could be seen as signifying self-defeating emotional patterns or cycles of reinvention.
In its self-conscious modesty, the work celebrates intimacy and smallness, fragility and vulnerability - and promotes an idea of slow and detailed looking, from near to image surface.
