Great Escapes

Great Escapes (2020) consists of three discrete but interconnected works. Using photography, animation and video I, the artist, transplant myself into a series of phantasmic virtual realities.

Using ‘triality’ as an aesthetic and technical framework, I create multifaceted worlds that depict ‘the real’ as an interplay of physical, virtual and imagined realms. Screen-based softwares allow me to virtually integrate myself into the marvellous structure of the natural world by embracing elements of digital artifice. Like the Surrealists of the 1920s–40s did with analogue technology, I employ digital tactics to exaggerate the interconnection of dreams and reality, self and other, consciousness and unconsciousness, subject and object. Specifically, I digitally adopt Surrealist photomontage tactics to explore the boundaries between what is real and what is fabricated in an image.

By constructing kitschy fantasy worlds for myself to inhabit, I am performing a ‘great escape’ from systemic norms of photography and feminine self-imaging by creating new models for documenting ‘the real’ that is more open, playful and imaginative. In turn, the immersive installation of these works aims to transport the viewer out of the everyday and into the edifice of my fabulist dreamscape.