EXPLORIST South Yorkshire, United Kingdom
I am an artist primarily using the human body to explore the environment through self portraiture and life drawing sessions. I am interested in collaborations, the artist/model dynamic, and the relationship of body and environment.
The Explorist is an ongoing project focusing on the human body and its relationship to its environment. Although mainly presented and documented through self-portraiture and photography, much of the work is also a ‘solo performance’ in which I test and explore my environment.
The naked body is important in my work, challenging the dynamic of human vs. nature, and placing myself in a more vulnerable position. It also a way of exploring environments through the skin, sensing temperature, texture and air movement in a way often denied to us. Anonymity in my own photos allows my body to stand in for ‘a human’ or ‘everyman’, rather than me as an individual.
I often use found objects, with minimal intervention, as masks, to explore issues of waste, pollution and consumption. These also play on ideas of the use of masks to represent different characters, to be playful, and on the concept of ‘Maskenfreiheit’.
Many of these ideas are explored in life drawing sessions, often collaborative in nature, and exploring the dynamic of model as performer/artists and artist as participants.
