Above: Colonial Dress made from paper maps. She’d wash plastic bags in order to reuse them. There used to be a material hierarchy-it wasn’t that long ago that you would be looked down on for using a sewing machine for art, unless you smashed it up! And my mother was obsessed with recycling, well ahead of time. Even more so once I left college and no longer had ready access to the more macho processes of welding and casting. I grew up in a sewing and knitting household-I could read a dressmaking pattern before I could read a book-and I like to work with what have been seen as traditional female crafts. Someone once called me “the material whisperer”. I have ideas, and materials find me, then through manipulating them and reading about them, the ideas come to the surface, linking the materials to wider issues.
How do your works develop out of such materials?
And they’re not new: I like the stains on everything that’s used-the residue, the left-behind. They also matter to how we live our lives in a post-industrial age. The materials often have an international presence, but at the same time we relate to them intimately, so there’s a private and public aspect. I’m particularly interested in using materials that have an inherent political content and history, everyday things we either don’t think about, or else might throw away without consideration: money, maps, tea, coffee, rubber inner tubes, old computer components, even toilet paper. But I don’t really make sculptures now-taking that to mean single objects-so much as drawings, collages, films and mixed-media installations which collect together many objects.
Yes, at the Royal College of Art in the nineties. Photo © Paula Beetlestone, 2019 Below: Rumpelstiltskin, 2019. Above: Trade Winds, Cambridge, 2019 © Susan Stockwell / Cambridge University 2019.