Tethers of a whole, August 2024
The People’s Gallery, Southend Forum Library

I’m currently exploring the concept of wholeness and what it offers to my sense of self. How does it feel to be whole? What are the sensations, tension, conflict or fantasies that bring me to, or prevent me from getting to this state of being.

The images for this exhibition are the physical imprints of the parts of me that are searching for a sense of wholeness. I use string as a metaphor to express these individual parts that arise when called upon in specific situations, environments and relationships.

These parts carve out a pathway where they may or may not encounter one another. They can merge and diverge; or get stuck and tangled up in knots. In some cases, they are fragmented and miss each other entirely.

It is a messy business to unravel these many different parts of me, which produce a map of the emotional residue that gets left behind. In some way, this map reflects my real interaction with the world where I’m tethered to people and places: the land, the sky, the sea and the sand.