I am an artist who is currently embarking on a practice-based research degree at Dartington College of Arts (now part of University College Falmouth).
My work is principally text-based. I work directly with books, texts and paper ephemera to create drawings, installations and sculptures that pose questions rather than deliver answers about how we communicate within our familial and intimate relationships.
I have been considering the impact of silence upon intimate relationships. Serendipity led me to read Elizabeth H. Winthrop’s second novel, December, which examines the effect upon a marital partnership when their daughter decides to stop speaking. I was most fascinated in the dialogue that went on between the parents when this silent child was present.
As with Raymond Carver’s short story, from which this title comes, my current research is looking into the possibility that it is often not what is actually said between lovers that carries the real emotional meaning and resonance but what happens in the spaces that occur between their words. I am interested in how to translate these pauses, these silences into physical matter.
