June 2017
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WELLNESS WOMAN
The video and sound installation Wellness Woman 2017 explores the fixation on achieving the ultimate state of health and beauty through pharmaceuticals. It makes jives to obsessive natures with superficial images of woman that are branded across products, a representation of the ideal, rather than the real. The work exposes the pills insides literally, as a thick orange paste bursts from the capsule shell when cut with scissors. Incorporating music, sound and the voice as an embodied material, there is a conscious to the piece, an unreliable narrator, a cathartic process to which I reveal what I think.
Wellness Woman manages and confronts viewer expectations, with its satire and climatic bluntness. The
interplay between space, image and sound indulges how we are relentlessly searching for things that push our expectations of reality, allowing technology to warp these veracities.
Wellness Woman
Triptych format intended for multiple screen installation
(1minute cut)
Wellness Woman exhibition setup for KUUBE II at Surface Gallery Nottingham
(Single-screen projection into corner wall feature with audio from three suspended headphones)
As you inhabit the space you walk between large white membranes that hang from the ceiling scaffold, with their wax-like texture they reflect the light of images that illuminate the space. As you walk behind these sculptural entities you encounter a projected illusion of a glimmering silver pill packet, glorified in its unnatural size.
Sensuous sounds reverberate in the space of fingers caressing and squeezing the pill’s smooth capsule shell
You feel lulled by the visceral nature of the imagery, but simultaneously disorientated by the shifting pace of this digitally kaleidoscopic landscape.That attraction/ repulsion dynamic energises the hypnotic retrospective of Wellness Woman.
Installation dimensions variable.
Three-screen projection onto hung latex materials, still image projection onto floor with resonating sound from speakers.