Watercolour and pencil, Cotton Rag 330 x 450mm
This was a piece I produced for exhibition, where I was focusing on our relationship with nature and environment. How we value the ornamentation of nature and how that affects habitat and home.
Much of my work is concerned with idle spaces and idle bodies. Often our society seems to be designed to create idleness, to remove the function of the Other so those in power are made indispensable. It's a pattern that's repeated institutionally, culturally and down to the domestication of wildlife and plant-life. My interest in the subject extends beyond our curation of flora and fauna, but sociologically how we place meaning and worth depending on class, ethnicity, gender. How we exoticise the Other, it has deeply rooted connections with racism, classism and patriarchal structures. It's something I would also see as being a kind of defense mechanism whenever we try to self-regulate in terms of our own prejudices. In this context, it's where a distorted "worship" is presented as an affection. But ornamentism typically renders the subject as otherwise without function and is ultimately self-serving.
