RE-EVALUATING MATERIALS CHANGE BODILY PERFORMANCE POLITICS PASSION PSYCHOANALYSIS PLASTIC LOVE PORNOGRAPHY ABSURDIST HUMOUR
OCTOBER 2014-MARCH 2015
Finishing a BA 2 years before I had been working with unfired clay slip, making objects, installations and films and exhibiting in Open exhibitions. I am based in rural Herefordshire and I wanted to challenge myself with new materials and different thinking. My original research proposal was based on experimentation with materials that melted or changed
 Iced Victoria sponge, wax candles |  Performance, MFA project space |
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 Post performance |
Wax, cotton wick, cake.
In October 2014 a nurturing grandmother makes a cake, filled, iced and decorated. She puts on her apron, lights the three candles and throws the cake onto the floor, shouting “This is for The NHS”
The cake was a vehicle for the candles modeled on the Steve Bell cartoon noses of Cameron, Hunt and Osborne.
In fact the candles weren’t necessary. But noses led me to Freud.
I was looking at Urs Fischer's wax figures, Paul McCarthy's absurd performance, and the videos Klara Liden which show a barely suppressed female violence against the object.
CAKE
Wax on board
Wax cast of the face of a blow-up doll. Exhibited at 20/20, in early January 2015. Our first joint exhibition as a group, in the small exhibition space at Chelsea College of Art. Curated by MFA course curation group.
The original theme was Passion. I bought the cheapest blow up doll I could find on line and made a mould of the face in wax.
The difference between the written advertisement and images and the absurd plastic reality triggered a chain of research and making. Alfred Binet a late 19thC psychologist and hypnotist referred to a sexual love of a fetishistic object as Plastic Love.
PLASTIC LOVE
 Wax on board 20x20 cms |  Lolita |
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Eine glanz auf der nase (a shine on the nose) is the fetish of a boy who described to Freud his love for shiny noses. Freud wrote that the initial shock of finding the mother has no penis is dispalaced onto another object and becomes the fetish.
LEGS SERIES
 Menier Gallery SHIFT |  |  |
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LEGS SERIES
Porcelain, cotton fibres, hessian, supports.
Made January february and exhibited at a group show SHIFT, Menier Gallery, June 2015.
Curated by students from Central St Martins Curation MA.
Fascinated by the seam marks on the doll, I was researching Sarah Lucas, Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois and their interpretations of body parts. finding my ideas more like theirs than Allen Jones and Hans Bellmer.
Using a technique I had used during my BA I filled shaped fabrics with clay slip. When dry, the fabric is peeled off leaving hairlike fibres. After visiting exhibitions at the Wellcome Museum of Sexology and the Silent Partners exhibition about arists mannequins, acknowledging the relationship between human and object, artist and doll and how this was viewed was changing my practice, this imagery now seemed redundant..
