Shards and stones, sticks and bones

<p dir="ltr">Research Statement: Shards and stones, sticks and bones Starkwhite Gallery, Auckland, 2025 Research Background Shards and stones, sticks and bones investigates matter and metamorphosis through sculptural, installation, video, and painting practices that synthesize childhood play, modernist design legacies, and occult knowledge systems. Building upon four decades of experimental practice since the mid-1980s, this project explores the permeable and changeable nature of materials—plastic, fabric, Perspex, clay, wood, plants, and sound—examining relationships between viewer and object through spatial activation. The research draws upon early 20th-century art movements including Dada, Constructivism, and Arte Povera, reinterpreting their material experiments and anti-establishment aesthetics through contemporary concerns. The exhibition's title evokes both nursery rhyme incantation and archaeological fragments, positioning found and elemental materials as repositories of memory and potential transformation. This work continues investigations into shelter, personal biography, and magical thinking, employing heterogeneous materials to create installations that resist singular interpretation and invite participatory engagement. </p><p dir="ltr">Research Significance This research advances understanding of how artists sustain experimental practices across extended careers while remaining responsive to contemporary contexts. By maintaining commitments to material permeability and metamorphosis, the work contributes to discourse on process-based art and the artwork as unstable entity rather than fixed object. The integration of occult references with modernist formal languages challenges art historical narratives that position rationalism and mysticism as oppositional forces, demonstrating their productive entanglement. The project's significance lies in validating childhood play as epistemological framework—not nostalgic regression but serious inquiry into imaginative world-making and alternative logics. The invocation of "shards and stones, sticks and bones" connects archaeological thinking (fragments as evidence) with elemental materiality (earth, bone, wood), contributing to expanded definitions of sculpture as assemblage practice. The work's playful and fantastical qualities resist institutional solemnity, proposing joy and wonder as legitimate research methodologies within contemporary art. </p><p dir="ltr">Research Contribution Shards and stones, sticks and bones contributes methodologically by demonstrating sustained engagement with heterogeneous materials as conceptual strategy rather than stylistic inconsistency. The research models how artists can synthesize influences across multiple historical movements without pastiche, extracting formal and philosophical principles to generate new aesthetic possibilities. By working simultaneously across sculpture, installation, video, and painting, the project contributes to discourse on medium-specificity's obsolescence, validating cross-disciplinary practice as intellectually rigorous. The work expands vocabularies for discussing fantastical art, positioning fantasy not as escapism but as critical lens for examining reality's constructed nature. The emphasis on metamorphosis contributes to process philosophy applications in visual art, demonstrating how materials can embody becoming rather than being. The exhibition establishes frameworks for understanding long-term artistic practices that resist market pressures toward signature styles, instead maintaining experimental curiosity and formal risk-taking across decades of production.</p>