2006

This work is a social piece – individual elements are ‘related’ to one another, bound together in a network that is both real, yet also imagined. In the arrangement of the forms, we recognise the groupings of the family, the tribe or the nation. The work invites us to see the gallery itself as a space of migration – welcoming, integrating, assimilating and excluding. In this installation, the ‘immigrant’ is provided with a sense of belonging, as in a family, but this brings with it new strains and tensions. The work mirrors one’s own feelings of inclusion and exclusion, and yet, to engage with the piece is to stand with ‘them’.

Made from antique kimono fabric, hand-me-downs which embody some ambiguous history, the fabrics utilised in the piece have literally been ‘lived-in’. The soft, enveloping forms provide containment, encompassing and enveloping the viewer. These forms are promises; they are wrapped up and stuffed full with something, yet we cannot get to what is inside. Like figures without limbs, and all-limbs, simultaneously, they make gestures, not unlike embraces. In the piece the viewer is invited to see themselves within an arrangement of ‘others’, provided an experience of strangeness and familiarity at once.