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Caster, photographic series

This work explores the interior space of the house as an architectural and visual metaphor, continuing my ongoing research into the notion of ‘place’. Caster aims to liberate the domestic space of the house from its traditional role and reconfigure it as a space that no longer has a ‘merely’ utilitarian purpose. The materials and objects that determine the space are presented as mental and perceptual, as much as physical.

The series elaborates on the common vocabulary of interior design: the familiar object of the carpet is used in empty rooms to evoke former occupants’ existence. The carpet acts as an index of presence – essentially the presence of absence. It retains the traces of human life, an object we tread history into, bearing our presence within its fibres or inscribed into its reverse. Caster uses the carpet to create sculptural shapes, transforming this everyday domestic object into a piece of mental furniture.

These psychologically charged images in Caster refer to Freud’s notion of the uncanny: they present the interior space as a stage, referring to psychoanalytic ideas of the house and its aura as an arena between practicality and imagination. The work also draws on Ernst Jentsch’s idea of the house possessing a dynamic, subversive lyric force within: I aimed to suggest this photographically through particular lighting conditions and colour relationships. I tried to create a visual language for describing the deeper and hidden strata of the house as an enigma, following André Breton’s interpretations of such spaces as symbolizing the structure of the unconscious. Particular scanning methods of the photographic negative were employed (an effect resembling charcoal drawings) in an attempt to suggest what cannot be represented – to make visible the domain of the invisible.