...I've a feeling that we're not in kansas anymore
(2011. Plywood lightboxes/transparencies installed for Fine Art Degree Show at Central St Martins School or Art, London)
Returning to the sites of childhood games of hide and seek, invested with the apprehension of being discovered and the fear of not.
Re-filling these spaces with the spectre of an imagined gaze to create a portal from a nostalgic, mundane place through to an alternate narrative that exists outside of the real – where the slippery and unreliable nature of memory is scratched at, ruptured and where temporary fictions that make a flimsy sense of our history are revealed.
Filmic tropes invested with a sense of wonder, voyeurism and childish anxiety – miniature reminders of 1950’s sci fi fictions, Cold War sensibilities and fear of the unknown – constructed from digital and distanced web images… the public deconstructed and corporeally re-realised into something private before being cast out again via projected light and made unprocurable.
Like Alice peering into the rabbit hole; staring into an unknown temporary world, constructed from the strange yet familiar… traces of wallpaper, a negotiable but corrupted landscape, a disconnected, ruptured sky and a disorientating sense of both absence and presence – the spectator surveys but in a mirroring gesture, the illumination disconcertingly gazes back.