1. Beginning potplant

"The Razing of the Palace. I made this series of works to accompany a drawing from the Pentheusmachine series (Ohohoh), which was made into a silkscreen print with 50ty50ty. In the play, The Bacchae, Dionysos, after being imprisoned by Pentheus, razes his palace to the ground. I thought to imagine my flat as Pentheus’ palace and think about the ways I’ve been contained, protected and fragmented in the space. I imagine this character living in a strange, gridded alternative reality that hovers somewhere between my life and the world of this 2400 year-old play. The grid generalises it but the props I used here are meant to indicate a domestic space. Without meaning to get too heavy about it, for the narrative I have in mind the structure of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” – a surreal change that slowly occurs in an enclosed space. The “Oh” bubbles are exclamations and symbols, but also here physical things that have weight, and the ability to reproduce and, perhaps, be contagious. I like that “oh” can indicate almost anything – it is an emotional reaction rather than a fixed meaning, and gradually these reactions accumulate and fill the space, charging it. The destruction of Pentheus’ palace corresponds to a kind of emotive disintegration of my own flat. The space stands, but how I live in it and understand myself in it is constantly in flux. It is important to me to note however that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – especially regarding whiteness and patriarchal logic the best thing that can happen is a kind of fragmentation and undoing."