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Transmutation  
Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah
Sept 2003 - April 2004

A disturbing combination of materials and spatial relationships are the means by which I generated an unsettled atmospheric space.
Transmutation was a large installation that simultaneously evoked sensations of familiarity and uncertainty.  

I am interested in exploring liminal (in-between) sites in my work. Spaces that may be actual (eg: corridors, airports, carports, shorelines,
spaces of travel/transportation) or imagined (eg: myth, folktale, memory, dreams, filmic, television, hypnotic spaces).

Transmutation hovered in materiality and meaning between science, the inexplicable- and home-handicraft.  Physically, the work
consisted of 33 pillows (the size of air plane passenger pillows). Each  pillow was made of white cotton (ex. Royal Hobart Hospital sheets)
with postcard  images of Utah desert places and Utah insects digitally printed (faded-out) on one surface of each pillow.

These pillows had real and fake human hair fringing on each side. These pillows were suspended with white cotton threading on each corner
to rise from just above floor level to a height of approx. 1/4 distance from the ceiling to visually present as three staircases of a tripod structure.
Each 'staircase' consisted of 11 pillows.  These flights of 'steps' triangularly opposed each other, to meet at a spherical space (gap) of
approx. 3 feet at the top.  As aforementioned, these pillows suggested a staircased 'tripod'.

A spotlight shone down from /near the ceiling and  directed a beam of very bright light through the space where the pillows hovered above a
spotlit area of approximately one metre space on the floor. This light illuminated an approximately 25cm length golden 'cocoon', which was
'trembling' (due to a concealed electrical device fitted inside the 'cocoon' and under the  flooring)  in the centre of the light beam and within the
pillow tripod legs. A blue and a red electrical wire (not 'live') was alligator-clipped to either end of this cocoon and these led across to two old
fashioned medical-looking monitors sitting side by side upon a medical-looking (Stainless steel) stand/trolley on wheels. One monitor depicted
an irregular EKG heartbeat reading. The other monitor will show a video (repeated) of the following footage: (1) slightly fuzzy b/w (40 seconds)
footage of someone (me) running toward then darting away from the camera in a lightly forested zone in riverside Melbourne wearing a
pillowcase over my head. This footage will then cut to  (2) me lying on the forest floor with my hair emerging through tiny holes in the
pillowcase (15 seconds), then (3) fuzzy tv waves  (8 seconds), then (4) b/w dead-screen (15 seconds) then back to (1).Adjacent to these
monitors stood a hospital bed-trolley with one stainless steel side-arm in the down position. This 'bed' held a mattress and white crinkled
sheets and a 'strange' altered pillow (alteration still to be determined)-  all appearing as though someone/something has just got off the
trolley...Near this trolley, one wall was held transfixed by a spot-lit tiny section of lacy curtain lacy is struck solid - as if caught in a gust of
wind from an alternative universe.

This work  represented  surrealist, forensic, futuristic and also domestic spaces. It offered an uncomfortable unification of the personal and
the cultural, the medical and the media worlds. The work intended to suggest that other realms of being and understanding coexist on this
planet.  This was not intended to be an 'obvious' work- its meaning was intended to drift and be completely different and
'completed' differently (ie: "understood" differently) by each viewer.

Themes that I am interested in that I am obliquely  referring to in this work include:

* Identity as perceived by:  science and science fiction, DNA, medical and psychological testing.

* the world of dreams vs. reality: what is the conscious and subconscious ?

* fear of difference, change and personal growth

* the role of the familiar and the unfamiliar in shaping who were are

* the unexpected: confronting a space of uncertainty

* natural and simulated worlds

* places of encounter- and hence the space of witness narrative in creating personal truths/stories/futures

* the Alien and the UFO in popular culture

* Absence and presence- traces and presences beyond the everyday

* The Afterlife, rest, sleep, sleepwalking, other dimensions