“In dreams, nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren’t quite themselves and open onto the impossible.”
Rebecca Solnit – A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Some days I think about how loss decimates our sense of identity, memory and home. Other days I wonder how memory and identity is shaped by the recall of a place. Another day I could be thinking about what I’m going to have for my tea.
Indices, memories and traces are key in my work and how this narrative can be conveyed through materials and interaction with a space. I speak of the ‘space’ within a subconscious sense which plays on memory and the uncanny and this sense of the unknown. I explore how an interior and exterior space can be depicted through the domestic. This is shown through imagery and illusion of spaces in time.
Spaces can be transformative places – I look at the everyday and see duality in language, meaning, object and visual – we live in a multifaceted world where disturbance can seem quite ordinary and magical.
Using a variety of materials, I use a process of layering and collaging, cutting and sticking with film, object and space.
I have been exploring a variety of themes within my work. I have been determined on navigating my way into this second year without trying to influence which direction my work will take with regards to materials and narrative. From just allowing my work to emerge from working within a space with a few materials to hand my work evolved into working in a site specific nature within the woods.
At points there have been many deviations of what it is that is fundamental to my practice – is it the materials I use (dirt, mud, wastepipes), the object (the dolls, the house, the domestic tool) or, the space? What it is that underpins my work?
I walked into the woods and spent time in this space. I created installations and sat until it became darker and noisier. I sat until I started to feel frightened. I sat until I couldn’t stay any more. I took the woods home with me and by bringing them inside, the domestic revealed itself as an important narrative in the work. The objects were domestic and the matter was dirt and waste. I held the dirt as a main thread of my research as if the muddy footprints would reveal something more. I soon realised that the use of this material is indeed part of my work but that what I was avoiding and kept hidden in the basement of my house, like a huge white elephant was, loss.
‘Shul’ is a term I was introduced to by Solnit. It can be translated as synagogue or as a term coined by Tibetan teacher Toshnkgkhapa meaning emptiness, a track, a footprint or the scarred hollow where a house once stood. For me the word creates silence.