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.