ARTISTS TALKING

As though about to vanish, pockets of blackness partially obscure the room from view to leave it looking sketchy and incomplete, its details forever lost like those in an unfinished drawing. Too small for its contents, it was a space where she felt her world shrink as she entered and once inside the bedroom; she had to widen her eyes to magnify its dimensions, narrow her mind to be content with just its four walls. Only then could she begin to move, to make the space around her expand...

My ideas originate from stories with strong connections to architectural space, both interior and exterior, and are the result of a continuing fascination with the notion of unbuilt or fictional environments. Exploring how fictional space exists both on and off the written page, I became interested in the way that literary fiction attempts to conceal itself and make imaginary places seem 'real'; how words translate into illusory worlds that we can neither touch nor look upon. In this sense my work represents an unseen zone, a kind of psychological pseudo space – it makes visible somewhere that would otherwise remain hidden from view.

Alongside other projects, I began writing Four Corners in late 2000 and during the course of three years it evolved into a body of work that spans literature, photography, sculpture, architecture and narrative to culminate in a series of fifty colour prints. Seen collectively, they tell the story of a woman who gradually grows more estranged and alienated from the room she occupies as it begins to take on a life of its own. Conveying the sense of a lucid or waking dream, the room often appears in a state of transformation, objects and furniture perform gravity-defying feats and figures seem to radiate light or materialise as bodiless shadows.

At first appearing to be lifesize in construction, my work involves the designing and building of theatrical sixth-scale sets and handcrafted models based upon the fictional stories they depict, intricately fabricated from card, wood, clay or plaster. Working in a non-digital format, I use traditional photography and the latent properties of film to create my own in-camera effects and turn these dramatic spaces into animate events. Only at the closing stages of photographing my work do the separate components of performance, space, narrative and action finally converge. Staged exclusively for the camera I like to think of my images as photoplays, acts without an audience.

Contact:
michelle.lord@sbc.ac.uk

'Four Corners' is at St Paul's Gallery, 94-108 Northwood Street, Birmingham, 29 January – 4 February. The project will be developed into an artist's book and a touring exhibition later in the year.