“Hermit” (2025)

(Mixed Media)

“Hermit” was inspired by investigating and learning about the way different animals have begun to incorporate man made materials into their lives. I was unsettled to discover that it is now not uncommon to find Hermit Crabs living in discarded plastic or metal bottle containers such as bottle tops; Caddisfly larvae construct protective casings out of a mixture of sand and fragments of vegetation held together with a silk like secretion, but analysis of these cases shows that the larvae have been incorporating microplastics from the environment for over 50 years. Recently I saw a photograph of a bird’s nest in the Ukraine carefully constructed from pieces of fibre-optic cable, originally used to control the drones used by both the Ukrainian forces and the Russian invaders, and which now litters the Ukrainian countryside.

Two of the main concerns of my work combine in “Hermit”, these are the manufactured world and the potential of artificial life. In my work the term ‘manufactured world’ is a shorthand by which I mean the objects and information that are created by mass production and technological processes. Imagining the lives of objects is a playful way of using anthropomorphism to imagine how machines and software may in the future gain agency and develop their own hopes, dreams, and desires. Only a few years ago the idea of artificial intelligence was something for the distant future but today millions of people use so-called AI every day and alarmingly little thought seems to have been devoted to the societal consequences.

“Hermit” proposes a prosthetic hand fashioning a hybrid home/body from scavenged objects.