STUDIO INSTALLATION: Roaches and Flowers

While on residency at the Vermont Studio Centre, I set up a studio installation for one afternoon only. Clearing the studio of all materials I moved furniture from the living quarters, items such as a large floor rug, some wooden chairs, a coffee table, lamp etc, replacing the fluorescent lightbulb with a dim yellow. The studio was converted into a living room - one that seemed almost complete - welcoming but with something missing.



In the background was a faint haunting echo from the British singer, Amy Winehouse, with her remake of 'Love is a Losing Game.' At first the room looks inviting. Visitors who expect to see a stark studio space feel the inclination to wander in freely and have a seat.

However, on closer inspection, the scene feel like a static moment in time, with dried and dead flowers in a vase, with what seems to be coffee in a teacup that has been out for too long, chairs without seats, a rug twisted one edge up the corner of the wall - as if someone had shoved it there absent- mindedly. There is a book but the cover and pages are missing, a picture frame on the wall with no picture, and a plate that is covered in sentences ripped and pasted from a book about violent conquests (see Conversation Piece).



It is only when visitors walk into the room and turn again to face the opposite end where they entered, do they notice the flat screen atop a white pillar. Like an isolated art exhibit in a gallery, the flat screen is looping a series of thirty selected photographs - all created while on the residency and from my series 'Roaches and Flowers.'

They are of domestic items such as cutlery and knives that have been transformed using shoemaker nails and flowers in combinations that make them appear as insects in what appears to be wide open landscapes. Like the room, the images are attractive yet hauntingly disturbing.

CONVERSATION PIECE - From Roaches and Flowers

Also part of “Roaches and Flowers: War in the Home.”, Conversation Piece is a sculptural installation, constructed from a ceramic plate, mixed media, and a second-hand book found in a garage sale in Vermont. ‘Savage Conquest’ was one of those stereotypical novels housewives supposedly read, filling their heads with fantasy and daydream. The plot involved a wealthy European female who visited an untouched island to pursue a torrid love affair with an indigenous male. Her furious fiancé follows her to wage war on the islanders.

(The cover of the novel)

This type of novel, in its deceptive fantasies which promote myths about social relationships and desire, is interrogated alongside the domestic space- another facilitator of myth and idealism. Stripping the book sentence by sentence, I pasted excerpts that referred to a physical war to create a psychological one.

Key sentences were used to totally cover the plate, which was then installed in my studio on a table, set with cutlery, wine glasses, and a serving tray of clams.

These clams were placed upright and open, alluding to moths and Venus fly traps. Embedded in them were rusty nails, slim phallic symbols inserted in the Yonic clam. These hard-shelled creatures, which are fleshy in the interior, now lie forced open with threatening protrusions.

The installation alluded to a dinner party for two, but only one plate is present.

ROACHES AND FLOWERS: War in the home

This series of photographs charter a particular psychological crisis. It is a visual narrative of conquest, where gender politics become visible through the vocabulary, iconography, and mechanisms of the home interior.

Domestic items such as cutlery and plates, intermingled with flowers and nails, form unseemly insect-like forms. Stereotypically considered a ‘woman’s space,’ the domestic center turns on its master. These insects, sometimes camouflaged or constructed with flowers, represent invasion, the unwelcome, the uncomfortable.

I am navigating a visual landscape within the illustrated physicality of a house structure. The house comes alive to speak secrets of abuse, battle for space and territory, negotiations of survival, and the politics of the personal. The female subject finds agency and defense-tactics through the personification of domestic items as insects.

Spoons and forks, plates and flowers – they become insects, they become weapons. These images, these created spaces, generate an unfamiliar feel in a space associated with familiarity and comfort (the home). They are simultaneously ugly as they are beautiful.

As the domestic space continues to become more alienating and complex, there is an intense emotive response to these incessant transitions from the familiar to the unfamiliar, in the physical and psychological realm. This emotive response exists in the ephemeral and in the metaphysical. The construction of creatures that simultaneously mimic the appearances of flowers and insects, offer new codes, new language, new translation to the realities within which they exist.

These creatures are found in domestic spaces at a point of transition, at a point of collapse and decay. They scurry through the rubble strategically, transforming from prey to predator, blurring the distinction. The landscape changes to an ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ Kafkaesque world, where these creatures interact with each other, with themselves, and with no one.