How did you get started making art, and was collage your first medium?
It was discovering a lot of my Dad’s books on surrealist artists that intrigued me and set me on this wild path of wondering what art is. At that point, I had no context of who Salvadore Dali and Rene Magritte were. It’s quite a wild thing to try and interpret as an eight-year-old.
Around that time I was making decisions about what to be in life and I was captivated by this ability to create worlds and concepts that are in your mind and figure them out or display them in an art form. It kind of felt like a superpower. I read a book on Rene Magritte a lot as I was growing up and it covered his whole life up to being an old man and having a huge body of work. He had a big exhibition at the end of his life and it made me think how that would be great to do, that I would be happy with that.
You’ve mentioned the surrealists, who else would you say influences your work the most?
The tutors that I had while studying fine art at NTU taught us how to think outside the box. They made us do things like create sculptures out of things scattered around the room and at first, I thought this was ridiculous but it formalised the idea that anything can be art. It made me understand and appreciate why some minimal art exists. They were super challenging in terms of any ideas that we had, they would push us and make us explain why we were doing things.
You are co-founder of The Carousel, a Nottingham-based creative space in Hockley – can you tell us a little bit about the thought process behind it?
It’s about getting people to be inspired and sharing the wisdom that I’ve attained. I am getting on a bit now, I am no longer a Trent graduate, so sharing the things that I figured out over time is a real passion of mine, because no one needs to make the mistakes that I’ve made. You often feel a bit abandoned by university after you’ve finished, you’re out of the cosiness of uni life and you’re out in the realness.
You’ve recently made a short film about your work, how did that come about?
So that came about by working with Tom Dennis who’s a filmmaker also based at The Carousel. He saw what I was doing and was interested in filming stories, so he began shooting me in 2021 and then we started collecting footage. I was looking for a way to visualise my process as well, to explain it all. I thought having a filmmaker as talented as Tom would be really important. He’s really good and going into the nooks and crannies of a person and what they’re about.
In the film, you seem to be an avid gardener as well as an artist. How does art, as well as working on your allotment contribute to your mental health?
It’s really important to me. I’m a big lover of plants, it’s the one thing that grounds me in life. Nurturing plants in the allotment is just really good for my mental health fundamentally. It creates a serene contrast to making this kind of work that can be intricate, detailed and a bit of a slog. Having that release of getting my hands dirty and being within nature is important.