The birds have been freed from their cages
The ideas behind the psycho geography of my body were first conceived from an obsession with wings, that later became a cage of shadows in Fear is the greatest cage. The themes of cages, birds and shadows were also explored using photographic techniques, poetry and collage in 1. shadow of a runaway nightmare, 2. i’d rather be a trapeze artist, 3. defeat of a girl and my chick my fowl.
When I returned again to playing with shadow imagery and connotations, a creepy, winged demon creature began to appear, thus crow girl was hatched.
While crow girl continues to struggle with the concept of captivity and freedom, there is also a latent content of crow girl that is violently sexual. Contorted into painful positions by the ropes that bind her, she entangles herself in a love/hate relationships with the trapeze that supports her.
“Besides nudity there is a strangeness of half-clothed bodies; what garments there are serve to emphasise the disorder of the body and show it to be all the more naked, all the more disordered.”
(Bataille: 1986: 170)
Doll grenades
i made some jar dolls in a fit of rage, doll grenades waiting to explode. she danced a dance of detonation. Puppet like she plays. She grew out of her skin and into the wings of crow girl....
Traces of tiger
Drawing inspiration from Angela Carter’s short story entitled The Tiger’s Bride, these images are experiments, an attempt to illustrate ideas of becoming animal.
Beginning by playing with an old theatre ghost trick using lights and glass to create the illusion of of transformation from girl to tiger, I went on to interact with video footage of tigers. I was interested in finding ways of expressing the concept that within every girl is a tiger trying to get out, and the possibility that despite accepted ideas of time and space, anything is possible.