I’m an Australian artist living in Amsterdam. I like painting and drawing, and sometimes I do that, but often I’m looking for a way to disturb what has become too comfortable for me in making art, particularly painting. So far, this has led me to work in installation, sculpture, video, sound and sometimes short texts. I collect pieces of material and objects if I think they might come in handy, but I don’t like to push them too far. I prefer the early stages of making stuff. Those moments seem to be the most stupid, fun, lively and surprising, so I try to preserve that in the final piece. I started working like this while I was studying an MFA in painting in the Netherlands when I noticed that the mess accumulating in the cabinets of my studio was more interesting than the paintings I had hanging on the wall.

My photographic work has involved placing myself in specific real-life contexts and documenting the interaction that takes place. These projects have involved traveling to France, Austria and Newfoundland where the social dynamics of each location have informed the images that I have produced. My art practice, focused almost exclusively on self-portraiture, underlines the importance of context and understanding one’s relationship to that context. By placing myself in various situations in the world and documenting my reactions to those situations, I am defining the different personas we construct socially. From this perspective, the choice of location for creating each project is a central component of the content of the artwork. Considering that China is the largest exporter of goods in the world and that it is emerging as a superpower built on the labor of its workforce, my project engages directly with the power dynamics at play in a global context. The photographs provide a human dimension to our abstract relationship to production and consumption.

In different ways and with diverse media, the Dutch/German artists Katrin Korfmann and Jens Pfeifer investigate cultural identities and juxtapose unfamiliar and common ideologies. The result of their three-month residency at the Chinese European Art Centre is a surprising manifest of how entrenched we are in our own culture, even though we are living and creating art in a globalized world where we can easily set up a temporary studio on the other side of the earth.