Blood on Silk: Bleeding Out physically consists a 12-centimetre high zinc box sitting on a metal table. Holes have been cut into the top face of the zinc; from underneath, the interior is illuminated. Domestic kitchen glassware, spray-painted on one side in silver, aluminium or chrome, sits on top of the box partially covering the peepholes. A projection is positioned to play over part of the top of the box, partly falling over the side onto the floor.

As the viewer approaches the table, the projection of drops of blood washes over the homogenised kitchenware in a sensual pattern of spread and retreat. The peepholes in the tabletop allow a partial or blinkered look into a series of linked surreal landscapes, represented by decolourised play and real medical equipment, toys and other found objects. They build up by references to the emotions or landscapes formed by the hallucinations experienced during a slow and partial bleeding out. Like a semi-permeable membrane, some things are held and others allowed to pass. 

Within the zinc box, the scenes are homogenised again by the metallic spray-paint of silver, aluminium or chrome. The artefacts of both play and real medicalised equipment, memories, and trauma are washed over by the projections of dripping blood. When the viewer bends to look into the peepholes found among the glass kitchenware, they become co-opted to form part of the projection surface without necessarily giving informed consent.  

Some of the scenes in the box can only be viewed or revealed when the viewer moves part of the artwork by lifting one or more of the spray-painted glassware objects. The viewer is then rewarded for what would usually be considered inappropriate behaviour in an art gallery or museum by being able to see a greater extent of the artwork in more detail. The ways the objects and internal scenes interact with the viewer, allowing and restricting access in response to particular actions, implies the work’s agency. The British archaeologist Christopher Tilley outlined this interaction as “… we touch the things and the things simultaneously touch us. The relationship is reciprocal”[1] and noted that “these things are the very medium through which we make and know ourselves.”[2] This work considers this relationship in terms of the agency described by the medicalised term “informed consent” and the way this plays out in the interaction between a viewer and an interactive work.

[1] Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, ed. Handbook of Material Culture. (London: Sage, 2013),18

[2] Tilley, Handbook of Material Culture, 20 

Exhibition History:

Her Moving Presence a group exhibition in 2016 at Airspace in Marrickville, Sydney, Australia, curated by Yvette Hamilton and Danica Knezevic.

Overlook a two person exhibition with Anita Bacic in 2017 at Stacks Projects, Potts Point, Sydney Australia

Cast a cold eye on life, on death: The Remake: Medicalised Death in ICU, my PhD examination exhibition was shown in 2019 in three of the gallery spaces at the Kirkbride campus of the SCA Gallery, University of Sydney, Australia .