I use found plastic to make textiles that are layered and stitched, as a proposition that plastic be re-evaluated as precious. In abstract compositions, I revise the persistent binary of textile as feminine and painting as masculine, as well as the aesthetic value of plastic via laborious craft-based processes. My works behave a bit like paintings and a bit like textiles but without the comfort of textiles nor the familiarity of painting’s material pedigree of canvas and oils.

In Future Ghosts language is an element in the composition. It takes the form of embroidered quotes from song lyrics and favourite authors (Ursula K. Le Guin, Martha Wainwright, Nick Cave, Rachel Cusk), broadly along the themes of time, ghosts, mystery and uncertainty. Removed from their sources and mixed in together, and the incidental printed words on the plastic itself, the quotes become another kind of abstraction. The text is both a way in for viewers and an opening out of meanings as the words combine with each other and with the plastic colour fields.

For many years I have made works as I listen to novels and podcasts, and on the couch watching television. I am constantly swimming in a sea of words and thoughts, in many languages and modes. Ideas jostle for attention, I have channelled them into the work, without hierarchy, allowing them to coexist with the materiality of plastics in the work.

Art is often leaking beyond the net of language, mute but extending its limits. Artists and art lovers write to explain but never replace it. I keep making art somehow.

Future Ghosts are artists and the work they leave in the world. They are writers and writings. They are plastics that will haunt us for thousands of years, are already haunting us. They are memories and portents. Artists channel strange things into being. They are hard, even impossible to explain.