Portfolio statement

Both archaeology and contemporary art articulate and navigate interpretive chasms. I enjoy exploring how these are crossed, who guides the crossing and why, and what understanding emerges therein.

Archaeology constructs wholes from fragments, sometimes literally. The dubious neutrality of this process drew me to a second undergraduate degree in history. The silences Foucault sought to excavate in the history of madness exist in archaeology too: gaps in the record can compound via excavation, classification, publication, display and interpretation.

Contemporary art inherits similar silences from conditions of its production and display, while manufacturing its own interpretive gap. An artist's statement may guide understanding, but no account of intent can account for the viewer, who plots the work against their own experiential map.

Museography stages a similar encounter. Objects, labels, spatial relationships, institutions, and staff frame interpretation, yet visitors must still infer the whole from fragments.

I confront this as a guide at the Aberdeenshire Farming Museum. My spiel is neither fixed nor wholly mine: it develops from conversations with visitors who are—or descend from—'fairmin' fowk', and through observing more experienced guides turn information into choreographed patter. Does this living interpretation enrich or distort the panels in the Weel Vrocht Grun, unchanged for nearly forty years?

Hareshowe Farmhouse was dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt at Aden, where a film proclaims it “mair like hame noo”: severed from function and context, its restaged form appears more real. Guides similarly describe the Horseman's House as a 'time capsule', although it was restored after decades of disrepair and combines original and interloper objects. The horseman's daughter, Mary, donated many of its contents and later guided visitors through her childhood home, performing domestic practices—such as making oatcakes—that were not hers as a child. Her presence made the past more real but and because it was a practised, participatory illusion. This created a shared authority between the space, performance, and audience: “a dialogic creation of meaning through a living conversation about the past that takes place in some present.”

My three portfolio projects investigate this meaning-making. Deaccess, for example, examines how provenance, interpretation and preservation confer significance. Research into secondhand objects increases their value and, therefore, the violence implied by their destruction. The project answers Doug Bailey's call by disarticulating and repurposing each object to disrupt its status. Christine Borland's forensic reconstructions influence me here by asking whether investigation recovers truth or manufactures authority. Michael Landy's Break Down and Cornelia Parker's Cold Dark Matter also explore the effects of classification and destruction: I'm drawn to, and uneasy about, eradicating one aspect of value whilst creating another.

Deaccess's scavenging method echoes the Wunderkammern that prefigured colonial collecting practices which emphasised possession over preservation and hierarchy over plurality. My interest in the production of history informs a desire to turn the acquisitive impulse upon itself.

My mixed methods reflect my interdisciplinary experience and include research, photography, drawing, embroidery, writing, coding and 3D modelling. Teaching has shaped my interest in practices others can readily learn, repeat and transform.

Art, like archaeology, is a practice: meaning resides in process and outcome. I recognise this approach in the work of Ilana Halperin, Giuseppe Penone and Robert Smithson, though their methods often depend on inaccessible sites, materials or conditions. Maria Thereza Alves and Deirdre Nelson more directly inform my interest in repeatability. Alves's Seeds of Change can be repeated collaboratively and iteratively across cities by tracing flora carried through imperial trade; Nelson's textile projects establish methods communities can adopt, alter and continue. In each case, the artist initiates a process without retaining exclusive control.

This matters to me as a qualified teacher. I reject the notion that complex ideas belong only to specialist audiences. I have taught détournement to a composite class of children aged four to eight, and critical analysis of Kafka's The Metamorphosis to an additional-support class previously fed a steady diet of action films. Both succeeded because accessibility need not require simplification: a provocation can support responses at several levels.

Détournement is especially illustrative. Its premise is simple, readily-available and older than the Situationists: change something to expose or transform its meaning. Like contemporary art and archaeology, it depends upon interpretation and reinterpretation. Interpretation demands dialogue; dialogue creates connection; and connection is essentially human. I want to develop methods that let conversations I begin proceed on equal terms or continue without me.

This programme would provide the critical framework and sustained attention for me to better understand how artistic and archaeological practices interact. Most of all, I want to make work that opens dialogue without treating said work or its interpretive structures as neutral.