The older I get the more I feel lost and confused. As children we are told we can be anything we want, and we all believe we will be success stories. We create a narrative that comes to haunt us in our later lives, as most of us cannot hit the heights we have been told to dream for; and in a capitalist world, if you are not a winner then you are a loser.

My characters are hurt by this narrative. They are past the age of determining what their ‘prime years’ will be like and are painstakingly accepting the mundane reality of their life. They hadn’t had the impact on the world that James Bond or Eric Cantona have. But they can live part of their lives through the lens of these winners with the beauty of T.V, pacifying their own inner narrative of having not made the most of their own lives.

The characters now are more interested in a life of dream and escape, of nostalgia bordering melancholy. I believe we live in a time were the past seems more hopeful than the future. Even if this is not true, the past definitely had more hope for the future than the present does.

The characters are just past middle-aged, white men; they are the lucky ones! Most likely these characters have had it ok, I think of them as probably more middle class. However, the point is that there is still an empty void in them, in their eyes; a discontent, or dissatisfaction, a hungry ghost in their belly. When the people who make the worlds merry- go round (the white capitalist middle aged man) are dissatisfied within everything they touch, their position of influence means this dissatisfaction spreads into everything around them, creating a world like the one today.

My work has recently consisted of making cartoonish figurative sculptures and rendering them into digital media. I have been intrigued by what happens to the sculptures when their physicality is lost, essentially what makes them sculptures; losing their essence; the figures feel like they have accidentally walked into a new space where they are trapped, a virtual space. It is as if they are a spectre of the forms they once were. Stuck in a space where time is no longer linear and meaning has no grand narrative, they battle to comprehend this new world, they have grown up in one much different.