Born in Swansea in 1989, I grew up with a keen interest in drawing and video games. These interests would later play a strong role in my sculptural practice, however after leaving school I took up an apprenticeship in welding and fabricating. For five years I developed a strong skillset which includes MIG, TIG and MMA welding, fabrication, machine operating, sheet metalwork and on-site fitting.
During my time as a welder, I grew to love painting, first with oils but then moving onto acrylics for a number of years. And what was at first a hobby, grew to be a passion bordering an obsession. Not content with painting on canvas, I expanded into doing wall mural commissions as well as selling a couple of paintings. This offered me a glimpse into a future where I could create art everyday and derive a living from it.
A downturn in work at the company I worked for resulted in redundancy, but rather than take this negatively, I saw this as an opportunity for change. And the change in direction was to take me to university to study art. Fine art painting was the discipline I had in mind to take up but in order to gain a wider perspective on what my artistic practice could be I took up a foundation degree in art and design at Swansea Metropolitan university in 2014. This gave me a taste of painting, drawing, photography, fashion, 3d design and sculpture. But sculpture was to present the most interesting possibilities given my years of experience in the welding and fabricating industry.
Whilst on this foundation degree course, I visited the Carmarthen School of Art for an open evening, which included an iron pour and a tour of the workshops. This university is unique in its approach to metal casting and metalwork, and presented itself as the perfect place for me to continue my studies. And after completing the foundation degree in art and design with a merit, Carmarthen is where I went to further my studies.
For the first year of the sculpture degree, I focused on metalwork and metal casting, applying the knowledge gained from my previous profession to great effect. The second year of the degree however, introduced me to the possibilities of digital technologies in sculpture. Working in a virtual environment, creating digital 3d objects, all came with a sense of familiarity due to my love of video games, in which I would traverse virtual worlds with various protagonists. My second and third year of the degree shifted focus to learning how to use the modelling software Zbrush, and how to integrate that into a practice that had hitherto focused on traditional sculpture techniques.
After graduating with a 1st at Carmarthen School of Art, I stayed at the university as an Artist in residence with a number of fellow graduates. This provided me with more time to research and merge digital and physical techniques, such as 3D printing, bronze and iron casting, augmented reality, plasterwork and parametric design. There was also the opportunity to collaborate with two other artists and try to bring digital techniques to someone else’s traditional practice. This process, as well as my on practice was really starting to show a glimpse of the huge possibilities combining the digital and physical had. The residency culminated in an end of year exhibition which included sculpture, painting, ceramic and photography. For this exhibition I created an augmented reality aspect by using the work as AR triggers for the viewers phone via an app called Artivive. This would then show a video revealing some aspect of the making of the work.
My time in Carmarthen came to an end after this, and I moved to Manchester with the love of my life, and fellow sculpture graduate, Fay Palkimas. A fantastic sculptor and maker, you can see her work on her website https://www.fineartfay.co.uk Since living here I’ve completed a couple of large scale outside sculptures. I got a job running two CNC machines, one for cutting and the other for routing. I’ve incorporated these machines into my practice in order to work with a broader range of materials and to a greater scale.