Giant Rat of Sumatra

Featured as part of Play! 2014, on 2^nd June I exhibited some work pertaining to my thesis amongst Royal Holloway faculty and PhD students in the University’s Practice Gallery. This movable feast-apparatus exists to support ‘the presentation of practice-based research in the UK and beyond. In providing a new, cross-disciplinary platform for practice-based research investigations, the gallery aims to generate new dialogues, collaborations and interventions between academics as well as across academia and artistic communities’.

My theory and praxis (‘THEORY AND PRAXIS’!) always seems all the better for being unseen, because I am a fraud and a coward – the opportunity to account for my doctorate by filling a small backlit, bespoke frame with bloody feathers, anatomically-correct lies and  Loch Ness press-cuttings felt like only a good thing.

The gallery comprised 12  units of sculpted furniture (‘Alice’ [a social space, a bench to sit on, a stage and a series of frames], ‘A Capella’ [two shelves and two chairs, meant to invite users to listen to music and encounter objects. There are two mp3 players and a two pairs of headphones and a variety of shelf spaces] and ‘Continuum’ [four shelves meant to display objects, and one of the shelves houses a 22″ screen with DVD player]).

Parentheses, etc

Designed and built through a collaboration with Bartlett School of Architecture, my thanks to Nik Wakefield the curator for the opportunity, the Gallery’s designers and to my fellow space-mates Nisha Ramayya, Prue Chamberlain, Diana Damian Martin, Clare Booker, and Libby Worth & Julie Brixey-Williams‘ Step Feather Stitch.