Untitled Installation
2004
Fiber-glass insulation, cling-film, floor-boards, wood

This piece of work was a site-specific immersive installation that concerned itself with the internalisation of realisation; realisation of the viewer within the space, of the materials used, and the process involved in the making of the work.

When one stands amongst exposed masses of insulation the sound is deadened, the material consumes all echoes, and one is simply left with oneself, with an abrasive cacophony of unnerving, internalised silence. A silence that seems out of place, at once humorous and disturbing. This sense of dislocation was compounded by the gradient, and hollow nature of the gentle slope of the false floor Sarah Mayhew Craddock installed in the space.

The materials in this work made no attempt to deny their real purpose, and were selected for their physical qualities, and their psychological associations. Curtains of abrasive, ‘fatty’ looking fibre glass building insulation, that one generally seeks to avoid, hung next to ‘skin-like’ cling film screens requiring careful (or not) navigation of the space. The work explored ideas around the honesty of the partial view, of accepting its inaccurate representation of any given thing as being more accurate than trying to understand anything entirely; the idea that to reposition oneself is to extend one’s view, and the tension that surrounds the acceptance of reality. And so in denying total visual or physical access in this piece through the use of taught cling film structures that diffuse the light, interrupt spaces and prevent a clear view the viewer must negotiate the space in an attempt to gain something that he will never totally obtain. Ultimately, all that the viewer was able to do in this space was to observe himself.