VIP Area (2012) 

The key element that flows through my work comes in the form of inter-relation with others, whether collaboratively or through participation, whether knowingly or unknowingly, the other maintains a creative involvement with the work's final outcome.  

This giving up of directorial control dispenses with the myth of the autonomous artist to generate relational works in the Bourriaudian tradition of Relational Aesthetics (1998).  However the situations and installations I create are often tinged with an unethical sense of antagonism in context with Claire Bishop's criticism of Nicolas Bourriaud's convivial interrelations: 'Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics' (2004). 

Through antagonistic aesthetics the viewer-participant seems to have been mistreated and unsettled from their ordinarily comfortable and uninvolved viewing position, and are forced from complacency into a position of thoughtfulness ranging from outrage to annoyance to disdain and even, occasionally, enjoyment.  

Antagonistic methods I have used have included: the exclusion of viewers from entering works, the duping of viewers with false information and lies and the use of participant's presence, image, texts, comments, as the subject within work. 

VIP Area (2012) took the form of an exhibition private view bar that allowed entrance to a select few on a guest list carefully contrived to create division between the included and excluded. For Wilkins Cox (2011) the audience was duped into viewing an exhibition of purposely, poorly painted abstracted landscapes marketed as the retrospective of a mythological great artist. Whilst artists themselves were deceived into exhibiting in the fictional YU Gallery (2012). 

 Yu Gallery (2012)