This body of work emerged during a period of profound physical limitation and sensory overload. I had recently lost my mobility, becoming physically disabled after years of moving inside a culture that normalised endurance, suppression and grind. My body, which had once carried me away from harm, could no longer do so. Pain, memory, signal, texture, sound, fear, attention and longing all arrived at once. The world thickened.

These works did not begin as concepts. They began as sensation. Pressure. Absence. Static. Liminal quiet. The feeling of being flooded while also hollowed out. I was trying to stay with what my body was perceiving. This was not a project about recovery. It was about learning how to remain present inside a changed body and an altered field of perception.

Alongside this, I was learning how the brain filters perception, how most nervous systems quietly sort what is necessary from what is not. Mine could no longer do this work in the background. My autonomic system stopped operating autonomously. Everything required attention. Sound, light, touch, temperature, memory, threat and pattern. The world arrived without hierarchy. I had to concentrate just to remain upright, to move, to be. This collapse of filtering became both the condition and the method of the work. The practice grew from a nervous system that could no longer edit reality.

At the same time, I began to attend to a wider register of human sensing. Beyond sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, I was living inside thermoception, proprioception, nociception, balance, pressure, depth, vibration and internal signal. The body became a dense sensing field rather than a background support. These works formed from inside that register.

The materials came from the domestic sphere. Household objects, refuse, foil, bottles, wrappers, bones, shells, clay, glitter, packaging and light through glasses of water. Domestic detritus as kin. These materials already carried intimacy, usefulness, neglect, comfort, labour, shame and survival. They worked alongside me as collaborators at a time when my own agency was fragile.

I was living inside hierarchy as lived violence. Inside structures that decide which bodies are useful, productive, readable or expendable. Disregarded household matter became a speaking body beside mine. What others discarded held and mirrored my own disposability. These materials did not represent rubbish. They functioned as witnesses.

The works developed through slow, repetitive translation. Objects were arranged, lit with torches, photographed, printed, painted into, re-scanned, re-stacked and re-photographed. Digital and physical processes folded into each other. Light moved through water. Images degraded. Signal broke down. Meaning slipped, then returned altered.

What mattered was not clarity. It was density.

I was working inside the interval where sensation arrives before language. Where feeling precedes narrative. Where perception has not yet been organised into explanation. These works hold that unstable interval, allowing uncertainty to remain long enough for sensation to arrive before thought closes it down.

They are records of perception, confusion, receptivity and the unknown, the terrain of a body learning, slowly, how to stay.

These works were not made to explain trauma. They were made to survive it.

Works for Moments of Being and Celestial Blobbies emerged during this period. They appeared through proprioceptive, kinaesthetic and psychological excavation, functioning as residual memory made visible, fragments of affect lifted out of the sensory field and merged into form.

Although physically awkward in their early installations, they became pivotal in shaping the methods that followed: working through gesture first, through sensation before articulation, allowing meaning to remain unstable.

They were early experiments in letting the body think through matter.