'The etymology of glitch finds its deep roots in the Yiddish glitschn (to slide glide and slip) or the German glischen (to slip). Glitsch is thus an active word, one that implies movement and change from the outset; this movement triggers error. '
Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A manifesto
In the gap between a world which seems to be teetering on the brink of ruin, and what feels like a wholly inadequate response from those with power, I am left feeing dislocated and paused. In technology the glitch reveals the fallibility of the system. Covid and Climate Change are highlighting the failure of capitalism. The glitch in my work is a form of disruptive patterning and a nod to failure and futile endeavour. Working large scale with cardboard and paper soon becomes ridiculous and absurd. The work is always just a little beyond my control, becoming a metaphor for the unknowable and unpredictable.
Working with ancient fragments from the Parthenon Marbles, fugitive materials including recycled packaging and tin foil, and autopoietic methodologies such as paper marbling, I aim to freeze frame a fragile, cumbersome precarity. After an image is first photographed, it is transformed through different generations of print media. Surfaces ripple and disrupt until they appear to vibrate with an energy or movement of their own. The digital drag of the glitch further destabilises these pre-worked surfaces, resisting translation and inviting readings around uncertainty and occlusion. Reflections, mirrors, and folds create unpredictable repetitions and depths across two- and three-dimensional work.
'The ruin despite its state of decay, somehow outlives us and the cultural gaze that we turn on ruins is a way of loosening ourselves from the grip of punctual chronologies, setting ourselves adrift in time. Ruins are part of a long history of the fragment, but the ruin is a fragment with a future; it will live on after us despite the fact that it reminds us too of a loss of wholeness or perfection.'
Brian Dillon, Ruins – Documents of Contemporary Art
In this body of work, print is often juxtaposed with large scale structures made from recycled packaging. I excavate fragments from ancient ruins, to transform and freeze them in time. Tension slides between the encounter with the scale of the work and the precariousness of its structure. Proximity to the work feels corporeal. Digitally enlarged marks crack, divide and crumble across the surfaces like they are being viewed under the microscope. The glitch zigzags and shudders a mosaic of unnatural colours across the surface like a system error on a digital screen or malfunction of a television set. At a distance the work evokes ruined advertising hoardings, but whatever they once advertised or announced has been lost.
