This body of work emerged during a period of profound physical limitation and sensory overload. I became disabled through pregnancy and have been since. Doctors still have little understanding of exactly why, with extensive complex post-traumatic stress disorder named as the likely culprit.

My body, which had once carried me away from harm, could no longer do so. The world thickened. Signs and symbols arrived all at once. Meaning became a mash of sensation.

These works began as an overload of information. Pain, sound, fear, memory and signals pressed inward, cluttering my perception and leaving no time or space for my body to act with any linearity. It was everything at once.

This project was a way of learning to remain present inside overstimulation and bodily uncertainty.

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, temperature, 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 leftovers and dross, foil, bottles, wrappers, bones, shells, clay, glitter, packaging, light and water. Domestic ephemera. Substitute objects. Matter matter. These materials already carried usefulness, neglect, comfort, everyday-ness and survival.

I was living inside structures that decided, quietly and repeatedly, which bodies were useful, productive, readable or expendable. I had become hard to perceive in many cultural and medical situations, like a phantom in the room. Disregarded household matter became another perceivable body in the room. What others discarded held the shape of my own disposability.

The home magic studies came from the realm of home cures. My illness was unknown, so I resorted to home medicine, that strange old place where care, superstition, ritual, desperation and household matter meet. I was giving form to the hectic desires, memories and signals crowding my unconscious space. Gluing down memories and musings in matter. Trying to free up room.

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 be.

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

Works for Moments of Being, Home Spectres, Phantasmagoria, Wish. Listen and Celestial Blobbies emerged from this period. They appeared through proprioceptive, kinaesthetic and psychological excavation. Residual memory made visible. Experiential debris. Sentimental sediments. Collapsed saturated meaning.

Some became handheld cavities for listening inward. Some became spectral time travellers made from household dross, light and water. Some became bedazzled metamorphic blobs, reverse embalmed, embellished and re-wilded. They were domestic rituals, home cure studies, tableaus, shrines, portable ceremonial interfaces, messages from my sensory system.

Their early installations were physically awkward. I want to leave some of that awkwardness visible. It belongs to the body that made them. These works shaped the methods that followed: gesture first, sensation before articulation, matter as a way of thinking, meaning allowed to remain unstable.

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