Artist Statement
Please click the pin below, containing the Post-Mortem Analysis as a secondary support to our statement:
What is happening to us? (as we know it)
Summarised by the HAIRLINE SPECTATOR, Department of Anomalous Domesticities.
‘Kitscape’ installations are physical reconstructions of alternate perspectives within an unsolved narrative. Multiple alter-voices: Hairline Inspector (the examiner), Scalp (the synthesiser), Furless (the witness), Meatmouth (the viscera), Moult (the in-between) and the wider-fragmented self – The UC (Unnamed Creature) – converge within a collapsing environment.
The space represents the point at which these perspectives no longer operate separately but are held together in an unstable nexus.
The settings in which I manufacture are distorted bedrooms of girlhood that also function as crime scenes and post-mortem sites. At the centre is a hybrid rabbit-human corpse lying in/being swallowed by a child’s bed. This figure represents UC/Furless, the ambiguous subject of the investigation. It is not a fixed identity, but a body constructed through memory, trauma and projection. It is the site through which all perspectives attempt to understand what happened.
The other alters are not physically embodied but are present through representative structure, objects and atmosphere.
Hairline is perhaps elucidated through the institution itself: being presented in an exhibition as a part of a wider, graded showing. The work is in an artificial condition, a university show.
Scalp, who attempts to synthesise theory and experience, is expressed through the evidential logic of the space: the diagrammatic markings/labels, the sense of investigation and thus, the act of looking.
Meatmouth is shown through instinct: a guttural form of ‘speech’ in which the organ of articulation (the mouth), has disintegrated, leaving behind rotted viscera in the form of latex ‘skin’ and coagulated beaded veins.
Moult can be found as murmurs, elucidated through a sound system. The ticking of a clock that is slightly out of rhythm, the swinging of a pendulum resisting synchronicity. Moult is found as juxtapositions, mould in living flesh, absence in presence.
Together, these ‘voices’ attempt to stabilise meaning, but ultimately fail.
This corresponds to a moment in the narrative where all the alters gather beneath the hollow tree (here, realised as a skeletal, metallic-looking form) This tree introduces a condition of suspended time, influenced by Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett) referencing a state of waiting without resolution. Around it, the environment begins to break down. Objects become perverted, warped and internally lit, as if they are no longer stable structures but residues of memory.
Recurring floral moulds spread across surfaces, acting as a unifying trace throughout the installations, behaving like a form of contamination. This presence links all elements and suggests that the environment itself is both disintegrating and reproducing simultaneously.
The narrative is not a sequence of events but a state of collapse. The alters do not resolve the investigation; instead, they attempt cohesion, remaining together within a space that is deteriorating around them. The final installation, ‘Kitscape; The Theatre of Divided Selves’ aims to represent this point of suspension, occupying the role of both witness and participant, a coalesced ecosystem.
The work materialises theoretical ideas of abjection through embodiment within objects and space. Constructing phantasmagorical, domestic environments that examine rupture through processes of material ‘rebirth’ and ‘redeath’.
I discovered the notion of the ‘abject’ through research into aesthetic categories, influenced by Julia Kristeva’s book ‘The Powers of Horror’. Abject is that which “disturbs identity, system, order” these boundaries can then be applied to the Golem, in Gustav Meyrink’s work. The Golem is neither fully alive nor dead, not human or object, but a creature of trauma. The rabbited being of the UC is a kind of Golem, a creature formed by sobbing in bed, so it’s ‘made of’ trauma. An externalisation of trauma in monstrous form.
According to Kristeva, the ‘abject’ is what we must “cast off” to reach stable personhood. This fragmentation of the self is reflected in the work through alternates themselves, psychic ‘others’ that represent the repressed, the impure.
What remains is a self-developed theoretical framework: the heterotopia of the self. It is drawn from Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, but re-contextualised by framing internal psychic structures as coexisting environments, each with its own climate, logic, and survival conditions.
The late-stage explores what happens when these internal spaces begin to seep into one another, producing a condition I’ve described as heterophobia: not fear of other, but fear of environmental misalignment within the self.
Here, I am investigating a problem that is ecological rather than ethical: some environments adapt, displace, or eradicate one another. Boundaries between self and other, past and present, body and architecture are unstable. The solution being that what remains is not an answer, but a shared condition: a group of voices waiting within a world that is coming apart.