Yes, that’s something that feels really central to the work and I think it probably goes back to my background in cinema, which I was working in before moving into art. That way of thinking about how an audience perceives or tracks toward and around something has stayed with me. It’s not just in the video works, it runs throughout installations too.
For the Soft Commodity show in particular, that question of perception really shaped the development of the work. It took a long time to find the right venue because I had a clear idea of wanting to create a kind of constructed viewpoint: platforms of spectatorship that the viewer would move through and around, reencountering the work from different angles.
With the train/car piece (190e and the EMD GP40-2, 2024), the sculpture is lodged across a narrow transitional space, a corridor between the two main rooms, which exaggerates the sense of compression as you approach. It’s mounted wall to wall, cutting across the passage and stretching that spatial threshold into something more visual, almost cinematic. There’s something about that moment where the piece adopts a kind of 16:9 framing; there’s a frontal, filmic encounter, both in scale and composition. I seem to have worked a lot in corridors.
But then, as you move closer, that illusion breaks. You’re no longer bound to a fixed vantage point; the viewer starts to pivot around the sculpture, and the work opens up, revealing itself to be an object, not a scene. It becomes digital in its materiality and presence. The body has to negotiate it, to duck or shift, and in that repositioning, something changes in how the work is felt. I think about the slightly awkward way you have to navigate a viewport in a 3D modelling software. The viewpoint is no longer cinematic, it becomes embodied, experienced in movement, in proximity, in relation. That shift in perception creates this kind of intimate tension–a sense of impending calamity that doesn’t fully arrive, but lingers as potential.
I think there’s something useful about working with spaces that already carry a kind of mood or psychological weight. You don’t need to overdetermine the work when the site is already doing part of that. The basement had that atmosphere, a feeling of low ceilings, pressed air, things left unresolved. I didn’t set out looking for a “grim” space, but I was looking for one that felt charged in a quieter, more residual way.
That kind of latent pressure interests me, where the environment feels like it’s on the edge of something, but it’s unclear what. It allows the work to sit in that same in-between. You mentioned alertness before and yes, I think there is a kind of low-level readiness that I’m trying to activate, but it’s not explosive. It’s closer to vigilance, or the sense that something might shift if you stay with it long enough.
At the same time, the works are sort of funny to me. They’re obsessive in a slightly pathetic way. There’s something of the anorak in me, the fiddly maker, deeply stuck on something. But also the kid who wanders downstairs, finds the father’s train set, and stamps on it while no one’s looking. That tension between control and destruction, between care and frustration, definitely sits inside the work. I did this show recently in St. Chad's new gallery, Penton Rise and it really lent itself to this feeling of an anorak’s shed that worked so well for the work, someplace someone is tinkering away at their own private logic.
Yeah, exactly. There’s something in that contradiction that I find compelling. These kinds of objects are crafted with care or precision, but they don’t really offer resolution. That tension doesn’t resolve; it just hangs there.
They do feel like toys, or like models you’re not supposed to touch. And I like that unease: when something invites attention but withholds interaction. There’s a particular kind of model-maker, who builds entire worlds with painstaking detail. There’s control, sure, but it’s always a little obsessive, a little unhinged.
There’s this eerie distance that comes with models; they suggest understanding, but you’re also always kept at arm’s length. There’s a contradiction between proximity and removal; you’re creating this whole context, but you can’t actually live inside it. I think that speaks to the broader mood of the work, this weird mix of closeness and alienation.
I think, with the floating miniatures, there’s something darker at play; not just the precision of the model, but the fantasy projected onto it. There’s an imaginative violence embedded in them. You’re not just building something idealised; you’re shrinking it, staging it, rehearsing its undoing.
In a way, it’s not so different from collage. Both involve a quiet violence. In collage, you’re cutting into bodies, into skin, into space; you dismember and recontextualise. Model-making has a similar charge. You scale something down until it becomes graspable, until it fits inside your hands. There’s an illusion of control in that gesture, but also a distortion. Shrinking the world to a manageable scale is a way of staging dominance over it or at least rehearsing that fantasy. But the result is uncanny. These objects don’t just depict a place or a scene; they carry the tension of having been reduced, abstracted, made strange.
It’s a kind of pacification. Things are made cute, handled, tamed. But in that taming, there’s an assertion of power. A model can’t crash, bleed, or scream. You’re removed from the mess of lived experience; you’re not in it, you’re above it. That distancing offers a god’s-eye view, but it also reveals something unsettling.
Yeah, I suppose those transitions, between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, have become less linear. I’m recently 30, but I don’t think I’ve moved cleanly from one stage to another. That kind of teenage restlessness or disorientation seems to have stretched out, it lingers.
There’s something about dissociation, this slightly numb, floating feeling, that feels very present, not just personally but generationally. It’s a kind of ambient malaise, like you’re watching yourself move through the world slightly out of sync. That atmosphere sits inside the collages, especially the boy caught in that moment before he acts, suspended between innocence and something heavier. They’re rites of passage, maybe, but they’re never clean cuts, more like blurred thresholds.
Yes, I really agree with that, those stages don’t fall away, they build up. I think the work often sits in that layered state, where multiple selves or states of mind coexist. The pieces hold onto adolescent anxiety or adult control, but never quite resolve into one or the other.
I hadn’t framed it that way before, but it resonates. I didn’t mention it at the time, but the train/car sculpture (190e and the EMD GP40-2, 2024) and Deadfall in the other room are both based on a car I used to own. So in that sense, the work plays out a kind of parting gesture. I was aware that my relationship with that object, the car, was coming to an end. The sculptures became a way of rehearsing that departure, or maybe letting go of it through a kind of visual fantasy. That slippage, between something real and something rehearsed, became a kind of tonal undercurrent across the exhibition. Something suspended, half-held.
The title EMD GP40-2 came from a YouTube video I stumbled on years ago, while I was still figuring out the project. It showed a train crashing into a car that looked almost exactly like mine. The car was being transported to a film studio, to be used as a prop, but the trailer got stuck at a railway crossing. The footage was handheld, shaky, casually recorded, but it carried this eerie clarity, as if the frame was doing more than the camera operator intended.
There’s a moment at the end where the person filming walks along the wreckage and zooms in on the train’s model number: EMD GP40-2. I kept coming back to that clip, not because it was dramatic, but because of how it had been witnessed. What should have been a passive background object in a film ends up at the centre of a real event, obliterated before it ever makes it on screen. Sublimated onto a different kind of screen. It felt like a strange inversion, where cinema is overtaken by its own event.
I think what stayed with me was how the footage sits somewhere between accident and authorship. It’s not composed in the traditional sense, but it still frames. That’s closer to how I think about spectatorship now: distributed, improvisational, shaped as much by circulation as by capture. You’re watching something unfold in real time, but you’re also aware of how it’s already performing. That kind of partial viewpoint, mediated, delayed, maybe even broken, feels closer to how we see things now. The title came from this bit of metadata. Just a small line of text, but it stuck. It felt like pulling something out of the noise, like a way to name the shape of the whole thing, or at least the edge of it. Enough to say it happened.
I don’t think stillness is ever neutral. It’s not an absence, but a kind of pressure that builds in suspension.
With works like Grounded or Interrupted Sequence, the components are wired, set up to look ready to activate, but they don’t. And I think that refusal, that delay, sharpens the focus. When I first started working with the fire alarm bells, I thought about letting them chime occasionally, something ambient, barely there. But the more I sat with it, the more I realised that holding them in a constant state of readiness carried more weight. They sit there loaded with the memory of a function, but never perform it.
I think we’re conditioned to respond to spectacle, to loudness, to activation. But I’m more focused on the moments just before or after. The tension that sits in quiet objects. There’s a kind of vigilance that emerges when something is withheld. The viewer waits and listens. And in that space, something else happens, something slower, stranger.
I think the work tries to stay in that unstable tonal zone, where something feels precise, almost deadpan, but also quietly unnerving. I’m not interested in dramatising violence. It’s more about circling those edges, approaching them obliquely. Humour, for me, often comes from that restraint - from not giving the viewer a clear emotional cue, but letting the tension sit. I think that’s where the unease comes in: you’re not sure how to feel, and that uncertainty starts to accumulate.
That said, questions around control have always been close to the centre for me, not just in terms of objects or systems, but emotionally. I grew up in a context where emotional responses weren’t always proportionate, and I think, subconsciously or not, that shaped the way I approach tension in the work. There’s a desire to hold something without letting it rupture, to stay with pressure, not as an explosion, but as a field of inquiry.
That’s where the idea of thresholds becomes useful, spaces of transition, where something is about to become something else. Earlier on, I was thinking about those thresholds in spatial terms, the line between public and private, or between spectator and participant. That’s in works like Controlled Jolt / At the End of My Tether.
Now, I think those thresholds are more psychological, about the tipping point between composure and rupture, control and collapse. And objects often become the medium through which that tension plays out. The work is a way of noticing how those forces accumulate and how they might be suspended, delayed, or redirected, rather than discharged.
We’ve been talking a lot about violence, but I’m probably more interested in the moments around it, the lead-up, the pause, or the shift that comes after. It’s not really about the crash itself, but how things get rearranged in its wake.
That’s the space I keep circling back to, not a climax, but a kind of unsettled middle. A point where things haven’t fully landed, or are just starting to come apart. I think it’s a useful way of thinking about impermanence, how forms or ideas are always moving, even when they seem still. That in-between space is where I find the most to work with.
For me, it’s more a way of staying close to certain conditions, of noticing how things are shifting, unstable, or in flux. It lets me work with my environment in a focused way, and to pay attention to how perception moves through those moments of uncertainty.
The idea of the crash, or any kind of impact, becomes a kind of entry point, something recognisable, even dramatic but it’s not really the core of it. What interests me more is how things reorganise around that moment. The blur before and after. The space where attention stalls, or flickers, or becomes unsure of what it’s seeing.
That actually reminded me of this children’s book I came across recently, Thank You for This Loaf of Bread. It was in a box of old books my mum had kept. In the story, a boy thanks a baker for his loaf of bread, and the baker tells him not to thank him but the miller, who tells him to thank the farmer, and it keeps going, back to the field, the rain, the wind, the sun, and eventually, God. Each page pushes a bit further, looping back through this long, interconnected chain of effort and circumstance.
I left it next to the press release in the Grounded exhibition at St Chads. On one level it ties into the literal presence of the millstone, but it also felt like something else was at play. This slow tracing of cause and effect, the way it softens certainty and opens things out. It felt relevant to how I think about the work: that it’s not always about what’s visible, or even what happens, but about what holds together around an event; before it, after it, beneath it.
The book is simple, even sweet, but there is something that stayed with me in the way it moves backwards. It shifts attention away from the finished object and into the network that surrounds it, all these invisible links, accumulations, and steps. That kind of structure, where meaning is not located in a single gesture but held across a system, is something I think about often. In the work, there is a similar logic at play, a movement away from resolution and toward the interdependence of parts and processes. Each element feels a little unstable on its own, but together they form an atmosphere, something larger than the sum, but still partial, held, and contingent.
