Brief Introduction… …"Chemical Life Support" includes several compelling figurative sculptures of people who keep chronic illness at bay with drugs. Each sculpture is cast from polymer wax mixed with the drug that keeps each subject alive. The reclining individual figures are positioned as if at zero gravity, conceived so that they barely touch the plinths on which they are set.

Use of material… … This series of work is about hidden things in life. People are kept alive by certain drugs- although when you meet the person, they look the same as you or I. I think it’s interesting to have the material in a sense hidden as well, so that when you look at it, it doesn’t immediately tell you that there is this drug involved in the making of the artwork. Each sculpture has mixed into the wax one daily dose of the drug the subject takes; so on any given day, the subject and the sculpture have the same amount of drug in them.

Having a sense of weightlessness… … I wanted them to be suspended between life and death, in a way, or slightly out of life, as when asleep. So when all the models came to the studio, I provided some pillows and stuff, and when they went into sleeping position, and we made a mould of them in that position. And then we took the pillows and bedclothes out, so that they are in fact in the position they would be in when they are sleeping in bed. But because there are only a couple of points where they touch the floor, they appear to float above it. They appear to be in life but also slightly outside it at the same time, in a contingent reality of some sort.

Perception of the audience… … When you’re in that room with those Chemical Life support sculptures, you kind of feel that they are soft, or delicate.