'Art is where we practise being fully human.
Art is where we work out how to live and love together, and how to live with dreams of immortality when we know we're going to die.
Art invites us and requires us to be curious about our full human potential. It can also help us achieve it; training us to think and see, to speak and hear and move and therefore simple "be" more vividly.
Art can cut through conventional wisdom and reveal the next, unforeseen, agenda, because it is created in the alchemy of the imagination rather than the factory of the will.
Art can give shape to our deepest fears, and help us to address and overcome them.
Art can help us find expression for the ecstatic joy of being alive and thereby help us feel that joy.'
'Shouldn't this be what can art do for people communities, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds?
For people who don't know what art is about, or for those who see it as belonging to the few, art needs to be relevant to people's daily experience, hopes and aspirations. Then it can begin to inspire people to transform not just themselves but also the world around them.'
'Art can transform the non-human into the human, the formless into the formed, the everyday into the profound, the passing into the permanent, the gathering into a community, the city into an idea.
Art moves us forward without engines or machines'
'An artist helps transform our thoughts, feelings, relationships to people, place and things into another more condensed shape. This practice is embedded in human lives and we have evidence of these activities from cave paintings to now. Which is such a delicious link throughout our human history.
We all have the perception to play and work with our active imaginations. Artists help us to connect with ideas of making and destroying so that we may feel more confident about renewal rather than frightened of change.
I make work now and each time I do, I try to reach what is at the periphery of my understanding rather than what is at my centre ground.
The periphery is a place of doubt as well as freedom. The freedom is about choosing to find myself in a foreign atmosphere where I can be less tempered by my previous work. I shed the accumulative luggage of earlier explorations and keep only that which is more generative. I think in terms of lightness, not in the light weight sense but so that I might gain more manoeuvrability and open heartedness towards learning.
I make work and of course I doubt what I do. The doubt keeps me explorative and guides me to demand more accuracy of myself. The failures are when I learn the most.
Art is as complex as we are. It is hard for any one of us, artist or not, to understand who we are and what we genuinely do and art, which comes out of this creative chaos, reflects our situation and helps us recognise its variations, how we connect and disconnect with other people, places and ideas.'
