"This exhibition was created as part of a third-year professional practice module where students take the lead in all aspects of organisation, curation, and publicity, as part of gaining experience in some of the key skills of being an artist. The exhibition title ‘Lipperin’ is a Shetland dialect word for spilling out and what we see here is quite literally a spilling out of creativity and ideas. Each of these students is in the process of forging their own individual visual language, embracing various media and approaches to the making of art. Though each student’s work is very different in style and intent, what is shared by all is an exploration on the theme of identity, self-realisation
and belonging. The landscape culture and history of Shetland flows through all these works encouraging us to ask questions and see the world in different ways."
Paul Bloomer

For me, it was a chance to explore identity and memory through drawing, painting, print and sculpture. My inspiration came from the shapes, colours and forms found on the body and in nature. It was an uncanny or homely entangling of human and non-human. The forms created stories and meanings that merged and changed within my art.

I often use found objects like driftwood, wool, seaweed and stone; or things that might be thrown away like worn books, household objects, yarn and clothes. They are wrapped, stuck and stitched together in my art. They hold meanings, stories and connections to place which merge and change within a sculpture. I often wonder why I have never thrown these things away. Collected like relics or totems and hoarded for years. Would it be like throwing away a memory?

When I was making the sculptures at home, at the kitchen table, with yarn and old clothes and things to hand, they felt homely. They became a part of my daily ritual, I'd wrap them whilst pasta boiled for the tea. However they changed in the gallery space. They become 'art' and people look at them and search for a meaning that I am not sure I intended. They are vaguely human which makes them uncanny; they are odd shapes with unexpected things inside them, which could be a bit of fun or
grotesque depending on what is seen in them. Someone asked if the black ones are evil, and the white good. Valid question, but the black ones are not evil. The white are not good. If anything the white ones are highly sexualised (traditionally, or religiously, or often considered ‘bad’ but I’ve never thought so). The white ones are tactless, they lack self control. Even when bound so tight in the wrapping, they are bursting out. The sculptures have little sense of good or evil. If anything, they are self centred, they do not care a bit about us, only their own existence. On a scale of good to evil I'd say they are probably all a little of both. They are all the same thing. All parts of the same whole thing.

It is a paradox because I drift between the desire to explain my work and the desire to allow people to make up their own minds. Part of me feels that my reaction to them and my reasons for making it do not really matter once they are in a gallery. It is the viewer's encounter that is important. I do not control what they see. They see the shapes and the textures and the objects but they will have different associations to those things. For example, a viewer might see hair in the work (I'd like to add here that it is hair from a wig, not my head, or anywhere else on my body), they may think it is funny, or pointless, or disgusting, or they may feel nothing at all. I would rather that it is not dismissed as pointless. I would rather that people wonder why it was put there. Is it there to highlight the feminist issues of hair, should women be hairless, smooth? Does the meaning change when it is placed next to lace? Are the sculptures asking why some hair is seen as vulgar? Another example is the bandages. I had them to hand. Do the bandages mean that the sculpture is in pain? Needs fixed? What do these materials symbolise to the viewer, something and nothing.