My work moves between paintings, objects, furniture, murals, technology and cultural projects because the questions can travel across materials without losing their centre.
Categories are useful until they become instructions
Painting is the centre of my practice, but it is not the only language I use. A painting can become a surface, a pattern can become furniture, a drawing can become a room and a room can change the way the work is understood.
Those movements do not mean the practice lacks focus. The continuity is in the recurring concerns: bodies, pressure, transformation, pleasure, discomfort, nature, technology and the strange intelligence of materials.
Fashion taught me that an image has a body
My relationship to fashion was never only about clothes. It was about image, construction, posture, surface and the way a person enters a room. A garment can change how a body is read. Furniture can do something similar to a room. A painting can change the pressure around it.
That is why objects and furniture belong in the wider practice. They are not merchandise added after the paintings. They are another way to ask how an image occupies physical space and how a person lives alongside it.
Code is another material
Code differs from paint, but it is still a material with behaviour, limits and consequences. It can organise an archive, create a route through a body of work or help people find what they need. Used without care, it can also flatten everything into a surface.
Building Countercult taught me to think about the infrastructure around culture. Countercult is not a service department of Sketchy Shona. It has its own public purpose and cultural infrastructure. The two practices share an interest in making rooms, relationships and possibilities where something else can happen.
One world, several forms
The archive should show connections without pretending that a mural, original painting, chair, tattoo, live session and cultural platform are the same thing. They are different rooms in the institution I am building.
The point is not to make every category equal. It is to let each form keep its own weight while showing the relationships between them. A practice can be coherent without becoming repetitive.
Let the form carry the question
I want the next chapters to hold more scale: original works, objects, rooms, public projects, selective commissions and the systems that let the work reach the right people. That does not mean saying yes to every format. It means choosing the form that can carry the question properly.
The work is allowed to be physical, commercial, strange, useful, beautiful, difficult and technically built. I am not trying to escape being an artist. I am trying to make that category large enough to describe the work.
Credits
- Original Sketchy Shona studio note on painting, objects, furniture, fashion, technology and the structure of a multidisciplinary practice.