Claire Douglass

Claire Douglass, The Georgian Parlour, Sutton House, Hackney, London, 2002

In a genteel Georgian Parlour, the place for the taking of tea, I filled the available display cabinet with a multitude of unspoken woes. Each piece of crockery was inscribed with a secret that I'd collected from anonymous donors over the previous year. From simple admissions of dislike, to stories of hidden sexuality, rape and eating disorders, the accumulated angst was almost audible.

Inscribed crockery, Georgian display case

this is another one that captivates me, i love the inner text on the surface of the tea cups, a love how its all bound together making it un usable, but also so tightlky compaced that yo would want to open it for fear of breaking the lot.

she says abput her concepts and influences:

Your culture hates you. No, really it does. There are so many ways that the culture we collude with, works against our best interests. You can see it in the various artifices and self-mutilations we employ to reinforce our visible femininity, masculinity or youthfulness, but it could also be seen in the unattainable and conflicting aspirations that permeate our ideas of, Motherhood, alpha-masculinity, the good life, success, the happy family. Take your pick, there’s any number of ways to measure yourself and be found wanting. It seems that to varying degrees, we have all been conscripted to reproduce the collective fiction of whatever culture we’ve inherited. If these ideas weren’t so damaging to the participants, they might be no more than a series of interesting observations, but there is private shame when we collude with, but cannot ourselves mirror the attributes that we aspire to. The anomaly between societal myth and our personal experience, the space where our own experience doesn’t quite match up to the expected culturally enforced model, that’s the bit I’m interested in. I am presently engaged in creating images that could have come from a parallel universe where these ideas are no more than historical artefacts. A universe where maybe the human species is allowed to be less than perfect.

this last bit just causes me to explore futher these ideas and maybe re considered people who infulence her like : Louise Bourgeois, Cornelia Parker, Tristram Hillier, Tony Cragg, Christian Dior, The V &A

http://www.axisweb.org/seCVFU.aspx?ARTISTID=5687