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In my work I move through artistic legacy and ask how various spaces of history, both conceptual and physical, characterise artistic agency in the present. My previous work looked at the barely perceivable impact of New Zealand painter Flora Scales on the development of a local Modernism in New Zealand, consequently this project came to be very much about how one develops a personalised agency. My current project shifts from this almost unknown character to investigating the very public figures of authors Agatha Christie (GB), Janet Frame (NZ) and Virginia Woolf (GB). In making this shift of scale or presence I seek to re-consider modes of address, or more precisely, I ask: ‘How does one speak as an artist when participating in an economy of voice, and subsequently, what space is it that this voice makes?’ I approach these fascinations by constructing ‘meetings with meaning’, whereby an encounter between the concrete and the abstract acts as the impulse for developing various gestures. These meetings can imply working intensely with an original manuscript, archival collection or specific location. These gestures take the form of sculpture, video, text, 35 mm slides, photographs, audio, readings or installations, which carefully choreograph these individual elements into one space that steps in and out from, magnifies and reduces, intensifies and diffuses the voice of the individual and the collective, the voice of the factual and the fictional, the voice of the historical and the contemporary.
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