Research:
The development and context behind the Unstable Acrhive, The Corpse of the UC and The Kitscape.This practice operates as a living archive rather than a linear body of work. Every fragment, object, and image is produced from within the same destabilised system, and therefore repetition is not error but method. Materials are reused, re-staged, and re-examined because trauma does not progress cleanly forward; it circulates, returns, and mutates. To make work in this way is to acknowledge that nothing originates intact, and nothing can be understood without being handled again.
The research is driven by a multivocal methodology influenced by montage-based structures such as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, where meaning emerges through juxtaposition rather than explanation. Here, documentation functions as forensic evidence; notes, objects, diagrams, and altered materials are treated as artifacts within an investigation rather than outcomes to be resolved. It could on the other hand be percieved as an organism, housing multiple organic materials- a system that cannot exist without all the different components (alters) feeding into one another. This archive does not stabilise knowledge; it contaminates it.
Central to the research is my self-developed theoretical framework: the heterotopia of the self. After researching Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (heterotopias are other worlds within worlds, with their own systems and logics), this practice frames internal psychic structures as coexisting environments, each with its own climate, logic, and survival conditions.
The work explores what happens when these internal spaces begin to bleed into one another, producing a condition described as heterophobia: not fear of the other, but fear of environmental misalignment within the self.
The archive remains open, unstable, and unresolved, because closure would falsify the conditions under which the work exists.
Writings: I kept a digital and physical notebook throughout this year, documenting research, thought processes and planning:
For PDF/Word files of the digital research and planning please see here:
But why a rabbit-creature?
The notion of the Golem, creations of alternate, animated creatures who hold mystical powers imbued by their originators. Gustav Meyrink wrote a book in which it is unclear who is speaking, him or the golem, which is also him.
The rabbit is a kind of golem, representing trauma through a series of found and made objects. There is also an aspect of the existential (as with the golem) in the coffin, which feels like states of corporeal decay; from strawberry jam to teeth.
The duality is interesting. A creature created by sobbing in bed, so it’s ‘made of’ trauma. An externalisation of trauma in monstrous form. So, we are all partly trauma-rabbit. Partly monstrous.
Nikolas Rose’s book ‘Inventing our selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood’ describes this further: “If we cannot disinvent ourselves, we might at least enhance the contestability of the forms of being that have been invented for us, and begin to invent ourselves differently.”
In other-words, we exist and are present, but we don’t have to accept the master narratives imposed by the world. We can create ourselves how we like- even as a giant trauma-rabbit.
Explorations of others artists, contexts and exhibitions and how they have informed the work:
Inspiring ‘inverted’ worlds, installation structure and materiality.
Inspiring utopia and post-apocalyptic terrain, to help explore how other-wordly spaces come to fruition artistically.
Inspiring connections between sound and material, how motion can implicate the viewer.
Inspiring golems- representations of trauma through animal-human hybrids.
Inspiring surreal, lucid landscapes and uncanny sculpture.
Inspiring fantastical landscapes, barren and cute aesthetics.
Inspiring conjunctions between organic matter and child-like investigation (the act of making)
Inspiring phantasmagoric settings through illogical/decrepit elements- i.e rust, mould.
Inspiring calcified girlhood, cute aesthetisization.
Inspiring pacing of medium, material quality and kafkaesque landscapes.
Inspiring organic representation through inorganic materials.
“To be ourselves we must have ourselves- possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must ‘recollect’ ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.” - Oliver Sacks.