Artist Statement

The main themes that drive my multi-disciplinary practice are queer ecology, colonialism and the idea of ‘Home’. I view the intersection of these preoccupations through the lens of natural science, mainly botany, and I employ the mediums of drawing, installation and video.

Paper-based works are foundational in my approach and influence my sculptural and video interventions. I consider drawing as an almost perfect language and an incredibly powerful tool to convey both strength and vulnerability in Nature.

I gather knowledge of form through drawing and when the narrative demands extension I translate the ideas into installation or video-based works. I use film as a language to create abstraction and subtlety around ideas that would manifest as too literal with other mediums.

My concerns with the study of plants and soils and the proposition of a non-human witness encourage me to further examine traditional lines of inquiry into biological ideas of sentience, neophyte, native and naturalization. These concepts pertaining to scientific discourse, particularly native and naturalization, are frequently used in geo-political discourse to form vocabularies of Othering. Concurrently, I question the documentation, organization and dissemination of biological knowledge within the rigid didactics of natural history institutions which define what we refer to as wilderness.

In my recent work, I draw new parallels between botanical research and decolonization. More specifically, the boundary between weeds and cultivated or desired ornamental species, and how these colonial discourses are turned on their heads when certain species proliferate at undesirable levels and start affecting ecosystems on a global scale. I’m interested in how this construct – weed – always refers back to what can resist man’s effort to control nature.

My practice aims to subvert or disarm the false binaries we have been conditioned to, by questioning the human considerations of Nature and emphasizing life, death, the marginalized, the unnoticed and the forgotten