Changing Room: Positioning the Self: Between dislocation, otherness and uncertainty in relation to space and time.
While referencing broad themes of global migration and social uprootedness, my work in particular examines the individual, story telling and non-linear narrative. What does it mean to leave your home and strike out and make towards the border? In response, I decided to create a series of temporary installations using sculptural materials, film projection and appropriated domestic objects. The use of such materials is important because it allows a quick and spontaneous way to realize my research. Each temporary installation develops a previous project and thus forms a sequence when viewed retrospectively over the two years of my MFA.
In my current work titled Changing Room, I set out to create an uncertain space. Walls are positioned off kilter, some suspended mid-air, while strip-lighting, Venetian blinds and screens cobbled from hinged wardrobe doors immerse the viewer in a strangely familiar yet disorientating environment. A roll of dimpled pink wallpaper hangs limply from a cheap clothes rail. An extractor pipe coils freely down into the space, serving to connect object-to-object. Objects take on a life of their own. A projected image floods a makeshift screen, interrupting the space and spilling out onto the viewer. It dislocates those who visit the space, denying them the fixed certainty of an edge or even a beginning.
My films centre on an unnamed fictional migrant character. One film shows a girl as she gets ready to go out; she tries to change into a dress, frustrated, she must find a way to fit in to the ‘new home’ she unknowingly creates with her garment. I set out to create a juxtaposition between subliminal remembered space of the films and the real experience of ready-made doors, blinds and built sculptural elements. The installation has to be negotiated, stepped over and walked through while the visitor must also engage with the intimacy of the film and its subtly erotic, swaying veiled imagery.