As a Fine Art postgraduate of Winchester School of Art, specialising in sculpture.  I have been inspired by Sigmund Freud and his work on ‘The Uncanny’ and its associations with the doll, specifically in connection with the gaze of dolls. 

            ‘Eyes are the window to the soul’

This suggests that the eyes of a doll evoke a soul, early physiognomists believed a persons face is the site where body meets soul, this placement of soul being sited within the eyes.  The definition of the word ‘pupa’ as doll but also refers to the growth stage of development of a butterfly when it transforms from a chrysalis which does not eat, but lies stiff and motionless, as if dead, until the adult insect emerges.  The word chrysalis can also mean corpse and the butterfly as psyche (the soul), metaphorically symbolising the soul leaving the body – the corpse.  A doll as a chrysalis ever awaiting the moment for the psyche to leave, living on the edges of a world of action and sound ready to take part when it so chooses.  This demonstrating Freud’s key point:

‘The uncertainty if an apparent animate being is really alive or whether a lifeless object might not in fact be animate’.

This is why dolls are uncanny, eerie objects arousing fear.  The term pupa also signifies pupil, and iris meaning speaker or messenger, a doll can speak through its eyes, communication through its gaze, as people connect through eye contact.

            I am interested in the abnormality of the normal.  Shock makes the viewer question or respond to our fear and fascination with the uncategorisable.  In this my final year my work has been associated with the innovative casting of dolls and recreation of new sculptural creations, and then cast in a variety of materials including chocolate and plaster.  I am also motivated by the bond between art and science explored through my work in terms of genetics, mutation, and eugenics and the fiction and reality they create.  My exhibited work portrays this evolution of the theme of science expressed by art. 

            In my installation ‘Remnants of the Past – Back into the Future’ I have played with the time paradox, and the use of images to create a fiction.  Gene manipulation as the future: what do we expect and fear?  Science out of control: the laboratory workbench juxtaposed with the curator archaeologist.  Primitive figurative art contrasts with the nightmare of the mutation in the specimen jar…

            For my 1^st year exhibition I created a participatory installation, ‘Tights always come down’, a cavernous walkway, a womb-like cave environment populated with figurative stalagmites and stalactites.  At the entrance a life-size pregnant stalagmite figure inverted, inside and secreted around the passageway are smaller forms dripping with paint, beads, clay and some containing sherbet lemons, which met with an enthusiastic response from the audience.  The title in reference to a saying of my granddad in order to differentiate between stalagmites and stalactites, it is the stalactites that always come down.

          Foundation exhibition final work, pseudoscience work on the theme of impact.  The creation of my own impact scale to assess what impact an object had when subjected to various forces within subjective/objective pseudoscientific approaches.  Three main categories: Various Physical Influences, Weight Determinate and Installation Variable Experimentation.  Illustrating the moment of impact and how to measure and demonstrate impact.  When you walk, run or jump your feet hit and impact with the ground. I explored this with the aim to create a record or relic of movement through leaving a visual impact of physical activity. 

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