Illness upset my plans for this project to become anything near amazing though I do look upon it with a kind of stray-dog fondness. It was born out of a love of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, in particular ‘The Oval Portrait’, and old medical diagrams from Gray’s Anatomy.
Everything had it’s beginnings in print, collagraph, monoprint etc. I used fragile materials to create the prints – Poe had an intense fascination with fragile women and I tried to capture some of that fragility between the press and the paper. The ‘death masks’ show a kind of decay while remaining beautiful, something only the Victorians seemed able to achieve… perhaps something only they wished to.
If you ever have a chance I suggest you read some Victorian ghost stories, for there is nothing quite so satisfying as being terrified and fascinated at exactly the same time.
