“I don’t really know about ghosts” she was saying “but I do know we can leave our bodies when we are alive”
“What really now? And is it so maidy?” he said…
“A very easy way to feel ’em go…” continued Tess “…is to lie on the grass at night and look straight up at some big star and by fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds of miles away from your body which you don’t seem to want at all.”
—Thomas Hardy, Tess D’Urbervilles, 1891
My practice is anchored within the parameters of self and becoming self-aware. It also deals with urban space, the notion of ‘das unheimlich’ or the uncanny and how familiar environments appear strange to us. I celebrate ontological multiplicity; a state which refuses the seductive power of fixed meanings and definite locations spatially or temporally. I depict multiple identities and fleeting states of consciousness. A young female figure stands alone but enfolded within a group of girls. She is surrounded by copies of herself. Multiple selves are always threatening as they symbolise the dissolution of the ego. In repetition the girl becomes an arrested character. She loses her originality. Adolescence is also a state of becoming, a world that is uncanny, ambiguous and has elements of Kristeva’s abjection in its partial and transgressive identities.
I would like to thank Anne O’Byrne without whom the making of this piece would not have been possible.