lampshades, wire, wood, neon tubes, electrics. #1 2009 (Oxford), #2 2010-12 (touring Plymouth, Exeter, Bristol, Bath)

Strange Fruit, Glasshouse St, Oriel College Oxford

Material Actions, Plymouth College of Art, CCANW Exeter, Bath University & Bristol

My work is concerned with both the physicality & emotional resonance of objects. In gathering and stacking, recovering & reworking I am involved with an aesthetic ordering of collections of the common place. The reuse of materials is a conscious strategy implicit in the history of textiles (home-furnishing and dressmaking, make do and mend) the mundane domesticity of lampshades elicits a sense of familiarity in the viewer, proposing possible lives lived and petits dramas performed.

The functional use of the shades is retained, but my concern in the work is more how the diffused light plays through the materials and how the colour works in a painterly yet 3 dimensional way, both as an individual object and in the relationship between elements of the group.

There is something about domestic lighting that refers to returning home; something in the use of electric current that implies a residual energy outside the object or material presence that connects to the bigger picture. This is not a piece about what happened beforehand, but the power of the mind’s need to return. By providing the trigger the surface of this piece is sufficient to tap that impulse without a forceful need to excavate the whys and wherefores. from Material Actions, essays Dr Kate Fletcher & Marianne Torrence, pub Aug 2010, Plymouth College of Art Press isbn 978-0-9557491-5-5