Culprits of Contamination
‘Where there is dirt, there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a system of ordering and classification of matter’ (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 1934)
Considering the socially constructed nature of ideas around both ‘dirt’ (Douglas, 1966) and ‘madness’ (Foucault, 1961), this project moves back and forth between self and society, reflecting on and exposing the interplay between the two.
If these are your words, not mine, is this your body too?
Who owns feelings? Are they part of us, the experiencing beings, or are they separate, nameable entities? Are your words and names and labels the same as the things they represent? Or are they, at best, translation; at worst, contortions and manipulations?
This project grew while I was volunteering on acute psychiatric wards, talking to patients who had been restrained under the mental health act. An attempt to process both my own mental health experiences as well as what I was hearing or seeing on wards, the images conjure the dissociative and the uncanny.
It is an existential study, blurring the distinction between perceiving and feeling, drawing on the significance of our relation to objects as revealing the world to us.
Repressed Structures
‘Negation is a way of acknowledging the repressed, indeed it amounts to a lifting of the repression’ (Freud, The Uncanny)
Covering or concealing and yet demanding our attention, the demands of that which isn’t in plain sight.
Coping mechanisms as an external armour and skin to the outside world - originally existing as a temporary solution yet coming to adopt their own form and relation to the world.
Suburban Solitude
Semi-detachment
Interactions
Ongoing collection of coexistences and dialogues.