Jane Hughes
Chiffonier
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Deconstructed chest - Mesh, Wood, Mirrors, Copper Piping, Clocks and obsolete artefacts. Film screening on loop
This is an autobiographical installation piece. In my childhood our family photographs and cine-films were sequestered away in a cupboard which we were forbidden to open or access. Control and ownership of these images was tantamount to holding the power and authority of our past.
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My installation is a recreation of the cupboard where childhood impotence and anxiety are stored. Full access to the piece is inhibited, but glimpses of sliced and transposed super 8 film, accompanied by an unsettling sound track, can be gleamed from different uncomfortable angles: small doors, a kaleidoscope, mirrors or seen upside down via camera obscura. Defective artifact adorn and inhabit the cupboard; broken gramophones , frozen clocks and newspaper from the past just out of reading distance.
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Through the use and placement of film and dysfunctional artifact within my piece I have explored ideas around family authority and truth within the context of the illusionary nature and corruptibility of any encapsulated moment. While my work exploits the raw footage of my own childhood, the intentional ambiguity of detail speaks of all families and
the inherent nostalgia of our memories. I’m interested in the tension and traction between individual and collective narratives, how a viewer might confront images, which although familiar, are not their own. My aim is to create work which is unsettling; where the occasion is commonplace, but almost everything else is open to interpretation. Where the motivations are hard to read and the meaning and narrative are there to be untangled .


