I am pre-occupied with human and other-than-human bodies in unstable relationships, and how this instability surfaces the incompleteness of our knowledge of one another. My work operates in cycles of iteration through which I contend with questions about inner experience, attachment, presentness and pretence. The outcomes of my practice take form as objects, installations, and speculative fiction.

Threading throughout my practice is an interest in the body: 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.

In my small scale sculptural works, I use objects and assemblage to experiment with and re-arrange representations of relatedness. In this play between objectification and subjectivity, identities shift, past narratives are suggested. Objects speak from their object bodies; the hierarchy of human and non-human levels out. The objects suggest they are playing out a psychodrama suspended in time, which might continue when we turn out the light and leave the room.

I make objects that 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.



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CJ lives and works in Cambridge (UK). They studied Sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art and completed their MA at Camberwell College of Art in 2012.

CJ has undertaken a large number of publicly funded commissions including The Tate, National Theatre Scotland, ITV, National Trust, The Cambridge Junction and Opera North amongst others.

Their work has been subject of solo and group exhibitions internationally and in the UK including Mumbai gallery weekend, Mumbai India (2023 group); My mind had been everywhere and nowhere, Pavilion Pavilion, Glasgow (2019 solo); The Water Colour Room, HISK, Belgium (2018 group); New Hall Art Collection, University of Cambridge, Cambridge (2016 solo); Block 336, London (2014 group); situ projects, Cornwall (2010 solo); Aurora Arts Festival, Norwich (2007 solo) and Wysing Arts Centre (2006 solo) amongst others.

In 2010 CJ co-founded Aid & Abet, an artist-run project space in Cambridge, which they co-directed until 2014. CJ works as a tutor, mentor, and lecturer, most recently at Glasgow School of Art.

They are a recipient of an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice grant for 2022.