“There is always a lot of movement and play with composition and arrangements before I settle on anything.”
The human hand, seen in various gestures, is a most prominent subject in your practice. What is the importance of the human hand to you?
Yes, hands also feature a lot in my work because I enjoy drawing them but also because of their symbolism. I am a very gestural person and I am always ‘talking with my hands’, as it were. For me, hand gestures are also suggestive of change – the same hand morphing to form new shapes, even as it reminds us of familiar expressions and meanings. So in my mind, my gestures are a sort of archive: these are motions I learned as a child watching Madonna’s Vogue playing on TV, or they are gestures I learned from queer people when I first moved to London. Our gestures form a living link between generations of queer identifying people, even as they manifest in our individual bodies in unique ways.
How do you begin your creative process? Is it sketching out an idea or directly working with the material to create a piece?
Drawing is very central to starting my creative process and I always carry a sketchbook with me wherever I go. However, I am not at all beholden to designs or drawings when I am starting new work, and very rarely does something I’ve drawn in my sketchbook translate into a final artwork. Rather, I work very intuitively with materials, and although I have different media in my practice, ultimately what unifies my work is the process of collage. Whether that’s digital collage or cutting and sewing pieces of fabric – there is always a lot of movement and play with composition and arrangements before I settle on anything. In this way, my creative process is iterative, i.e. it is a constant process of refinement until you arrive somewhere different from your initial ideas. And I find this to be extremely helpful and a very generative process.
Tell us about the atmosphere in your studio while you’re working. Are you listening to any music? Is it silent?
On a day-to-day basis I love listening to podcasts, but I find them too distracting for working in the studio. So instead I’ll just listen to instrumental music or else I will play an old TV show on repeat – the ones that I’ve already watched multiple times – so I can dib in and out without paying much attention to the plot. It’s all about having something on in the background which isn’t actually too distracting.
