American arts and culture magazine New York Glamour recently contacted me about my practice. In the interview I share how living with the ordeal of viral keratitis led me to research the wider concerns over advances in DNA sequencing and regenerative medicine at Imperial College, London. Discovering that science is harnessing the power of the virus from whichI have suffered all my life in engineering cures for cancer, led to my doctoral thesis proposal of the Viral Sublime.
The sublime has its origins in the ancient world and yet it remains a symptomatically modern aesthetic. In 2013 in one of my sketchbooks I scribbled, ‘ the world is increasingly likely to see a major even or pandemic in the twenty-first century’. The concept of a Viral Sublime is being refreshed and reinvigorated for a post-Romantic age when the world is under such cataclysmic threat, as SARS-CoV-2 forces a solitude on our atomised lives that many would rather avoid.
Problems of the body are universal, so through encompassing layers of glaze over time, intermingled with smearing and daubing of colour in conjunction with imagining, sensing, memory and perceiving, my practice has become defined by the process through which I make sense of my lived bodily experience. For the full interview click here: