Systems Practice
My practice investigates how organisational, environmental, institutional and behavioural systems shape experience, authorship and form. Systems themselves become material for artistic inquiry: their relationships, rules, feedback, delays, permissions and patterns of behaviour influence how the work develops.
I work through sculpture, installation, painting, diagrams, participatory processes and documentation. A physical artwork can give form to relationships that are otherwise difficult to perceive. The process of bringing it into being also reveals how people, organisations, materials and environments interact.
Systems as the Subject of Inquiry
The distinction between the subject of inquiry and the method of making is central to my practice. Systems, governance, emergence and adaptation are subjects I investigate. Sculpture, painting and participation are ways of investigating them.
Participation functions as a methodological vehicle through which behaviours within organisational, environmental and governance systems can be observed, navigated and materially encoded. The inquiry can therefore follow relationships between people, institutions, communications, permissions and environmental conditions across the life of a project.
The Structure of My Practice
- Systems are the subject of inquiry.
- Participation is one method through which relationships and behaviours become observable.
- Material expression can take two-dimensional, three-dimensional, spatial or durational forms.
- Organisations, governance and permissions help establish the conditions in which the work can happen.
- Co-authorship develops through distributed decisions and contributions.
- Documentation follows how these relationships and material forms change over time.
Working across Scales
I move between individual actions, collective structures and the wider conditions surrounding a project. A single woven ring, a connected ring sheet, the group making it and the organisation hosting it can each offer a different view of the same developing work.
Questions at these different scales include:
- How does one action affect the possibilities available to others?
- How do connections between elements generate properties that the elements do not possess alone?
- How do communication, permissions and practical dependencies affect what can be made?
- How do weather, maintenance, access and changing site conditions influence an installed work?
This approach follows networks, feedback, emergence, recursive processes and adaptation. It allows the unit of inquiry to expand from an individual encounter to the organisational and environmental relationships within which that encounter takes place.
Making Relationships Visible
Geometry, material behaviour and spatial arrangements help make relationships tangible. Repetition can establish a pattern; connection can create structural dependence; suspension can reveal tension; a break can expose the way forces travel through a form.
In Complex Systems, individual willow rings become a connected surface. Diamond-shaped spaces emerge between the rings, while the sheet acquires flexibility and structural relationships that depend on how the elements are joined. The pilot also revealed how choices about making, contributing and assembling affected the collective outcome.
In Tracing Systems, material preparation, co-authored torus forms, installation and durational observation provide different opportunities to follow how a work develops through relationships with people and place.
These material investigations sit alongside diagrams, systems maps, photographs and written records. Such records help trace connections and changes across scales while retaining the particular conditions of each project.
Participation and Artistic Method
I design initial conditions: materials, spatial arrangements, invitations and working processes. The work develops through the decisions and interactions that occur within those conditions. Its final form can carry traces of shared making, negotiation, practical constraints and environmental change.
The artist’s role includes making, coordinating, observing, negotiating and documenting. Conversations, organisational exchanges, permission processes and installation decisions can all influence the artwork’s form and development.
Read more about shared making, choice and authorship in Participatory Practice.
Sustainability, Resilience and Change
Questions of sustainability and resilience run through my material and environmental work. Sustainability raises questions about resources, conservation, continuity and reducing harm. Resilience brings attention to how a system responds to disturbance, adapts under pressure and reorganises as its conditions change.
For my practice, this opens a set of artistic questions: Which relationships hold under pressure? Where do connections weaken or break? How do fragile or temporary structures respond to changing conditions? What forms of coherence, adaptation or collapse become visible over time?
Willow, reclaimed materials, changing weather and site activity make these questions available to observation. An artwork can be followed through tension, weathering, degradation, repair, growth and transformation. Resilience is considered through relationships between elements and the behaviour of the whole.
The Complex Systems pilot observation diary follows an installed ring sheet as it encounters pollarding, exposure, broken connections and new growth. These observations feed back into how future projects can be prepared, installed and understood.
Research through Making
My approach draws on systems theory, cybernetics, complexity science, ecology, organisational behaviour, network thinking and artistic practice. These fields provide concepts for examining nonlinearity, emergence, interdependence, feedback and behaviour across nested systems.
I bring those concepts into material investigations and follow what happens through making and observation. The artwork, the process of delivery and the resulting documentation provide different kinds of evidence. Interpretations remain tied to the conditions of the particular work.
The inquiry asks what I learn as an artist, what people involved in the work perceive or learn and what the work may reveal about complex systems. Reflection and documentation help distinguish those questions and examine the evidence for each.
Practice in Projects
Explore Tracing Systems and Complex Systems for project records, or read How I Work for an overview of the working process.
