Strange Magic

It is said there is always a moment to be seized when the most ordinary being, or the most masked, reveals their secret identity.  But what is interesting is their secret otherness.  And rather than looking for the identity behind the mask, one must look for the mask behind the identity – the face that haunts us away from our identity – the masked divinity that in fact haunts every one of us, for an instant at one time or another.

Jean Baudrillard                                                                                                                                    For Illusion Isn’t the Opposite of Reality.

Strange Magic is a visual exploration of the interior world of self in relation to the exterior world in which there is inevitably a blurring of boundaries or a leakage from inside to out.

Elements of the natural environment have become a metaphor for these revelations.  Tightly cropped or obscured images of people spout vegetation their mouths, the ends of the hair, growing along the spine.  There is a visual confusion as to whether the plant material is entering or exiting the body.

The vegetation while lush and beautiful is also damaged, leaves nibbled by insects, seed pods burst open with the fruit long gone, bleeding tendrils dripping from the ends of the hair.  

This series of photographically based work, printed on archival linen, is the artists most heavily embroidered to date with a bursting free from the image plane using mark making executed through stitches of metallic thread.