A spot of scopophilia

By projecting the drawings via data projector, I made them not only untouchable, but distant and spectreral – an apparition.

I returned the drawings in the form of projections back to a familiar space. My grandmothers house in which we lived during the time of my Father’s disappearance.

 Like a mausoleum, the house had lain empty since my Grandmother’s death several years ago and is a potent source and container of many of my childhood memories.

 Fresh snow blanketed the garden and a sense of theatricality is embedded in the projections that I recorded there  and references to the possibilities of an Narnian world are obvious. The projection become a window – where it becomes unclear whether we are looking out or looking in…

 Projecting the drawings into the cupboards and onto the fixtures of a nostalgic and domestic space creates a strange juxtaposition between the the known and the uncanny/the strange.  An temporary apparition or spectre is created and the subsequent viewing of this event via the photograph is a disorientating one – the spectator is not completely aware of what is going on – the space looks familiar but the event is not.

The domestic space becomes dysfunctional. 

 The cupboards within the space are emptied – the clutter and function of them has been removed and the space re-filled with the intangible, the unknown (the projected image)

 Where the projected image hits a door frame or shelf a rupturing occurs – an interruption or fracture… something has broken but this becomes something new.

 The projected image is draped over the space to make a new image – a fresh narration.  The apparition of an object or space (the projection) is laid over another object to become something else. Temporarily the apparition over-rides the real, the actual… it is like a haunting.

The Collages…

 A collaged imaged has a ‘wrongness’ that feels appropriate – its construction made possible by the deconstruction and rupture of something that came before. A violent act (cutting and tearing) becomes a nascent gesture.

The component parts of the collages were sourced (like the drawings) from the internet/google images and were selected because they illustrated a thing that I either found bewildering as a child or that somehow referenced voyeurism and watching.

 These private, psychologically loaded spaces have been constructed from a very public source. The absent ‘landscapes’ suggest a presence.  There exists an underlying sense of unease and of anxiety… the sky has turned upside down, an iceberg lands in a field, an empty lookout watches….

 This is an act of image construction whereby a  ‘reality’ is created from a ‘fiction’ – these internet images are a fiction  – each one has been conjured up onto the screen from a subjective understanding (or misunderstanding) or a memory… for me, they did not exist before outside of my imagination or an unreliable memory bank …. The invention of a ‘truth’ from an image that is (because of its source) unreliable. 

…last few weeks in Charing Cross Rd

… re-visiting and re-filling… looking in and looking out… watcher and the watched

… exploring spaces that operate somewhere between an imagining and a memory of a remotely viewed place (via collage)