             |
 For the last ten to fifteen years my work has been driven by social issues mainly those concerning children and their safety. The work references childhood and the home using xerox transfer prints of my drawings based on old family photos, old sewing pattern images, and domestic details. The images seem to be of bygone era but the issues addressed are extremely relevant today. Floor standing and suspended paper houses with images of children trapped inside were created in response to the meteoric rise in social networking where children become isolated and vulnerable to bullying and predators in their own homes. You peep through the windows, the viewer becomes the voyeur. The installation of a schoolroom with views out onto a deserted playground was my response to the shooting at Sandy Hook, the twenty backpacks to each of those children who died on that day. My recent body of work has looked at the forced movement of children, either by laws written by governments or the children’s choice due to the precarious situations in which they live. ‘Stolen’ and ‘Stolen II’ cover racial, political and social reasons in the past for the removal of children from their families in Great Britain, Canada, US, Australia, Spain, Argentina and Switzerland. ‘Invisible’ documents the arrival of thousands of children each year from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras at the US/Mexico border and what happens to them. All three pieces comprise of pairs of paper shoes and shipping tags. Each tag has government policies or the consequences of those policies written in pencil written on them. |