The Mercy of Rot
Autumn 2025
Mixed Media and Found Object Installation, 9.1 ft high x 6.6 ft wide.
Displayed at the University of Reading Art Department, 18/11/2025.
Materials: 48 x 40 inch wooden pallet as platform, two hand sewn double-duvets 9.2 x 12.6 ft (using childhood fabrics) foam, papier mache and paper clay ‘rabbit head’ with hand sewn embellishments, latex doily cardboard plate, wooden cutlery with fur-fabric sewing, found objects: antique chair, side table, wrought-iron planter and sand timer. Installed backdrop with cable ties connecting to metal electrical piping, draped over wooden pallet. Colour-changing LED bulbs (x4) fitted behind chair and underneath table. One lamp set up behind the backdrop to emit a warm glow above the rabbit’s head.
Research/Context of this exhibit: The aim of this installation was to practise construcing an unstable domestic environment where comfort and deterioration coexist. A backdrop of hand-sewn duvets made from childhood fabrics forms a soft, protective surface- but this needed to be disrupted, so I focused on its scale and suspension overwhelming the space. The use of cable ties and the exposed structure of the AV room cuts off any sense of warmth, hopefully turning the textile into something closer to a membrane than a shelter. The overturned chair traps and frames a large, hand-stitched rabbit head. Again, I focused on exaggerated scale, stitched seams, and mixed materials (foam, papier mâché, and fabric) to position it between toy and body, both cared for and visibly deteriorating. This tension reflects my influence from Louise’ Bourgeois’ ‘Quilting’ 1999, Link:
A soft sculpture made from the artists’ cast-off clothing; which I saw in person at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, October 2025. This work elucidates how fabric becomes both a method of repair and a record of damage- this paradox being an integral aspect of my own work and research in presenting trauma’s hauntology. The surrounding objects—wooden cutlery altered with fur, a latex doily, and a sand timer—distort familiar domestic items into something uncanny. I wanted to represent a disruption in both intimacy and routine, by having the objects modifications rendering them dysfunctional, pointing to the break-down of stability. The sand timer introduces time as a slow, inevitable force of decay, reinforcing trauma as something that persists rather than resolves. This aspect of time was something I wanted to explore further in furute exhibitons and thus became one of the core influences of my next solo exhibit; ‘Countdown From Clay Lane’.
Moving forward I would like to further embed and draw upon on the aesthetic sensibilities of the novel Against Nature, by Joris-Karl Huysmans, 1884, which I heavily analysed in my dissertation ‘Bleeding Between the Lines’. As the works embrace of artificiality and excess, constructed a space where decay is not hidden but aestheticised, as a means of not just coping but surviving trauma. This was the main personality trait of one of the alters’, ‘Gown’ who is terrified of the reality of their surrounding grotesquerie’s that they instinctively recreate it, as replica, to attempt a sort of control.