I always wanted to be an artist/inventor. My father (poet) and mother (dancer) brought my brother (also an artist) and me up in a remote thatched cottage in rural Berkshire, England with no bathroom and very little money. My mother stole vegetables from the local farmers field, we had a homemade lavatory placed inside a wardrobe located outside of the house and we shared a tin bath one after the other in front of a log fire once a week. I was the last to enter the same warm tub of water.

My father used to read poetry to us and my mother taught us to be mischievous. The local gamekeeper would leave us dead pheasants by the shed hanging by their necks on a hook. My mother would pluck and cook them. In winter I couldn’t see out of my bedroom window because the beautiful frost patterns on the inside blocked the view. On the outside hung long magical icicles as longs as my arm from the freezing drips of water from the thatch. Living so close to nature gave me an understanding of how nature works, its beauty, its brutality and its rhythms. My mother was fascinated by how the brain works and encouraged me to explore the psychological side of life. 

My dancer grandmother was a Jewish German refugee (her father was killed in Auschwitz). She emigrated to England in 1938 and was fascinated by Carl Jung.

I went to art school as soon as I could and studied sculpture. I further developed my studies exploring light and in particular holography at the Royal College of Art, London. It was magical to be able to create forms that required no suspension or support where the interior can be visible. It was like studying at Hogwarts. I continued my fascination with light and gravity with a holographic residency at the Holocenter in New York where I made a holographic animation. I loved the psychological and emotional potential as the images were so elusive and the viewer had to move from side to side to make the animation work. A dialogue was created between viewer and artwork. This led me to want to explore virtual reality so that the viewer was not just looking at the light artwork from the outside but actually inhabiting the same space within the artwork.

I was awarded a NESTA Fellowship (National Endowment for Science Technology and Art) to explore, research and develop my art into virtual reality. I learnt how to program images to move and respond to a viewer’s roving in virtual space. I made a tall sculptural chair for the public to sit on while they explored the virtual reality artwork. Their feet would physically dangle and not touch the floor. I thought that if I could break the relationship between a person and the ground then the brain would receive the artwork differently, more openly because they no longer had a floor and its implied rules of gravity of this world.

The challenge for me was to keep all that I loved about nature and our primal psychological structures while using technology. This is a critical axis. After I made my virtual reality artwork, I realized that, while I loved the potential magic that technology could offer, I was missing the physicality of the real world. There is something primal about standing next to and trying to understand a physical object.

Read 12 sculptures inspired by Jungian archetypes: History. Ideas. Process. in its entirety here.