Little Way

The patron saint of my old school, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, was famous for her 'Little Way', a personal doctrine of seeking holiness in the ordinary and everyday, and of spreading God's love and kindness in small and simple acts. I am often very quick to declare that I have no religious beliefs, but I also recognise that my upbringing in religious schools has duly affected the way I think, and I would love to believe that St Teresa (a young Carmelite nun from the 19th Century, who died at the age of 24) has inspired my art practice.

Although romanticising its impact on my work, truly I have often thought about St Teresa's 'Little Way' when considering my approach to the world and to art. Before I began looking at dust and even unnoticed spaces, I made work about the everyday, the banal and the things that seemed to pass other people by. Now I am more familiar with the idea that art is a tool to say something, a commentary on politics or life or experience, where as when I was younger it was only about beauty and what I thought was nice to look at. The desire to observe the beauty in the everyday is still very much a part of my practice, however, and my aim (although sometimes I am reluctant to admit it, because beauty is sometimes portrayed as a clichéd notion) is to make people aware of the beauty that surrounds them in the littlest of things. I take a lot of photos day-to-day of things I think are beautiful or poetic, and use Instagram to log them. Whilst I don't consider them to be artworks, I think that they work to a similar end and might spark a change in people's perceptions of everyday encounters.