About
My current work invites confusion between objects and bodies, and makes visible the points at which the object-body disintegrates, fails, and loses its structural integrity. The object-body is both an abstraction and also a means to queer the process of representation. It is ambivalent, displaying yet also refusing both vulnerability and resilience. Surfaces are ruptured and/or reflective, forming screens the audience can be absorbed into and obscured by, surfaces for projecting and absorbing ruination, injury, and transformation.
Threading throughout my practice is an interest in the body and processes of exchange: traces of my own physicality transferred through making, the audience inhabiting the spaces I construct, and the materiality of objects and bodies in transitional states that emerge in my writing.
My installation works create moments of presentness in the audience, so that the space fully occupies their experience. Yet at the same time, the space always remains partially withheld from them. I use darkness to slow people down, forcing them to rely on touch, immersing them in a space where time decelerates and a sense of being outside of something permeates.
The objects that I make mimic and pretend. Our access to them is always incomplete, yet their proximity, tactility, and intimacy are also invitations for the viewer to engage with their half-hidden suggestions and unfolding possible realities. The objects have agency and a life of their own. Objectness is also a recurring theme in my speculative fiction: humans often find themselves turning into objects or developing obsessive relationships with the non-human. This process is porous; writing and sculpture have become iterations of one another.
In decentralising the viewing subject, shifting them to the side as other agents and agencies slide into and out of view and grasp, my work suggests alternative modes of being present and relating, and opens up space to imagine the hidden life of the visible world.
Bio
CJ lives and works in Cambridge (UK) and has a studio at Wysing Arts Centre. They studied Sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art and completed their MA at Camberwell College of Art in 2012.
CJ has undertaken publicly funded commissions for organisations including Contemporary Art Society, The Tate, National Theatre Scotland, Historic Environments Scotland, ITV, National Trust, The Cambridge Junction and Opera North.
Their work has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions internationally and in the UK including: Mumbai Gallery Weekend, India (2023, group); My mind had been everywhere and nowhere, Pavilion Pavilion, Glasgow (2019, solo); The Water Colour Room, HISK, Belgium (2018, group); These restless objects, New Hall Art Collection, University of Cambridge, Cambridge (2016, solo); Heavy Sentience, Block 336, London (2014, group); situ projects, Cornwall (2010, solo); Aurora Arts Festival, Norwich (2007, solo) and Wysing Arts Centre (2006, solo) amongst others.
CJ works as an independent mentor, and has tutored and lectured widely across the UK for institutions including Glasgow School of Art, Leeds School of Art, Norwich School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, and the University of Cambridge. In 2010 CJ co-founded Aid & Abet, an artist-run project space in Cambridge, which they co-directed until 2014.
In 2022 they were a recipient of an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice grant.
CJ has an ongoing collaboration with playwright, Lewis Hetherington. CJ and Lewis are currently Creative Directors of the film project who will be remembered here? supported by Creative Scotland and Historic Environment Scotland.