For a few years now I have been thinking about "strangeness" not in scientific terms, but as a descriptive term. What makes something unusual or extraordinary? Why do we feel "strange" when we see something, is it just because something is new or unfamiliar? Is it different for all of us? How much is fear and how much is intrigue? What makes something bizarre?
I recently watched a documentary about automata and clockwork machines designed hundreds of years ago to mimic life. The person I was watching it with then told me all about the uncanny valley, a term I had not come across before…linked to our emotional response to robots and human likeness.
The works I have been developing over the past year link to non visual sources which trigger responses within us, creating different kinds of test pieces and development compared to working directly with imagery or physical sources. For me “The Imagined” has enabled me to create works that have the quality of the unidentified, a strange museum object, the imagined MacGuffin, the object from folklore which only survives through word of mouth and communal story…
"Talisman Pectoral". Hand dyed yarns, hand felted surface, oxidised silver. Made in 2010
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