My work is a collage-based visual enquiry into an unrecorded working-class notion of self.

I think it is obvious to all who have an interest in such things, that in the modern Western world, there is a crisis in the requirements to be human. The expression and concept of identity have fragmented. Who we may think we are has become contestable and hard to discern. This has come about through deconstructing those discourses that were once vital in forming a sense of self, the family, clan, community, and society. Ordinary people, by which I mean the working class, could construct viable and sustainable identities using these frameworks (I know this because this is what I did). This has caused the painted/photographic portrait to stagnate. It is now, more than ever, a document of power and propaganda designed to conflate the social mores of a failing society. It is an economy of actors who understand identity as a contractual exchange of goods, ideas, and gestures and is mired within the notion of Homo-Economicus. An individualistic worldview, where the concept of likeness is an exercise by which identity corresponds to and is captured by a fixed representation. Under these conditions, the contemporary portrait is of little intrinsic value as an accurate document of self and identity.

My work abandons the Cartesian trope of representation by conflating the relationship between all matter/entities using the open grammar of collage and the potential of digital frameworks. It will propose a portrait that prioritises poiesis over techne and present a post-human experience of identity. By this I mean it will be one rooted in all the senses. A sensorial likeness.