Caster

One might refer to the discipline of architecture as functional, rational and grounded but my photographic series "Caster" views the representation of the interior space of the house in an antithetical manner. For the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon, buildings were ‘thresholds to a kingdom of the marvellous’ and my image presents the house as more than a ‘machine for living’ as identified by the modernist Le Corbusier.
The photographic image of the series "Hewitt's Heap" uses my own house in London, which when moving in, appeared to be inhabited, if not by the former occupants in their physical form but by their ghosts (the Hewitt family had left all their possessions and furniture behind). By reconfiguring and ‘reinventing’ the familiar object of domestic life such as the carpet the series looks beyond design and function. The work uses the carpet as a metaphor for the indexicality of the presence of the former occupants - essentially the presence of absence. “Caster” uses the carpet to create sculptural forms, transforming the carpet as an everyday domestic object into a piece of ‘mental’ furniture. The carpet becomes biomorphic: exploding, concealing or embodying, making the house appear to be a sentient and pulsating being. The work oscillates between a consideration of the relationship between the sculptural object and its photographic image: the turning of the carpet results in the ‘turning’ of the photographic negative.