living room

This three screen high definition video artwork is a family portrait of types. It is a rather claustrophobic and chaotic piece that pretty accurately reflects the dominance that the children have in our shared space over the holiday period. This is a stage in a much larger body of work that I have been developing around images of childhood that, I hope, show something other than ‘innocence’. Since the late 90s I have been interested in my son’s games, words, songs and drawings and have made other work around these themes. Recently my daughter is also becoming part of this work.

Good job my kids like performing. They have both seen the piece and given it the thumbs up. That’s great because I think the dialogue I have with my kids about the work I make is really important. I continue to ponder the implications of featuring my children in artwork that I might exhibit publicly and want to include them as part of a playful process in it’s development. I hope they regard the resulting images as representing celebration, desire, passionate attachment as well as difficulty, trouble and tension. Already I am aware that Sam’s view of what I make changes rapidly with the passage of time and this is something that I hope to look at in future work.