Disguised Bodies - Exhibition at Articulate Projectspace, Sydney

With my sculptural objects, I aim to disturb conventional ideals of beauty and suggest different layers of meaning behind the strange and perhaps even ugly pieces. I aim to elicit contradictory feelings in the viewer by creating objects that show beauty and infantile innocence on the first glimpse but also elicit effects of displeasure or even disgust. I would describe my sculptures as scattered objects, disguised bodies.

In the small pieces, I used felt in combination with doll parts and human hair. Felt is considered a protective, warm material with positive connotations, but in combination with the hair and the doll parts, the reading becomes ambiguous. The doll in our culture is associated with beauty and infantile innocence but also with displeasing anxiety. It conveys both, pleasure and displeasure, the living beautiful innocence and the uncanny in-animation.

The two larger pieces, John and Mary, one male one female, made from used, discarded male/female underwear, are in dialogue with each other. The overlay with the slide projection of images of eggs without shell should add a different, layer that suggests the ambiguous image of beauty and failure of two creatures in an enclosed protected world.