Initially when I began exploring my project, I was heavily concerned with assemblage and installation practices that talked to material-object relationships. After 'Labour of Love' (2020), I became interested in this kind of new world that my installation could possibly create or achieve between the viewer, object and space. It was a kind of space that allowed for a small escape into a fantasy world. For a moment one forgets about their reality. No matter how little of an extent this was achieved, it is what propelled my thinking around this notion of fantasy or escape at the beginning of 2021 and the weight in holds in visual language such as art. While still establishing a sense of my practice, assemblage was a process of making that I intuitively gravitated towards, it further went on to inform my own principles of aesthetics and its role in material thinking. Assemblage seemed to allow for contradictions, where it could dislocate function and removed meaning from its origin. These methods and techniques opened an entry point towards fantasy and escape notions that I was interested in, it also invited adjacent notions of childhood and nostalgia. I suppose I investigated fantasy, escapism and imagination quite head on, with a sort of direct heavy handiness, instinctively I gravitated towards my own yearning or mourning of childhood. I gravitated towards a familiarity - where the fleeting moments of childhood were grounded by cliques motifs and symbols. This included hearts, stars, crowns, butterflies, dresses polka-dots and castles. I was investigating fantasy through the lens of representation at this point. The castle structures were central to my installation as it is what introduced this idea of experience into my work. Playing with big and small sizes, allow me to experiment with these more technical aspects of installation practices. Although the 'castle' had been pulled a part, and kind of scattered it was still recognizable or familiar to a castle because of is distinct structure and shape. Materiality was informed by these themes as fantasy, escapism, childhood was explored through provisional means such as cardboard, found objects and paper. I suppose it was reminiscent of childhood art projects, it was also this sort of questioning of material function and how certain materials are privileged over another. I wanted to explored this further as it introduced a kind of tackiness to the material aesthetic. Because narrative was element that evolved by consequence of a representational mode of making, it provoked questions around whether a narrative was instilled within the installation or whether a narrative is understood differently by each individual. This then lead to a relationship between the role of the narrative and the notion of imagination as a material. In reflection, there were a lot of adjacent explorations or ideas introduced, that while there were central ideas and concerns driving my project there was still a lot of openness. However, while I was pleased with how the installation turned out, it became apparent that the experience of the work was essential to access this kind of fantasy or escapism I was aiming for.  It seemed that one could only have universal experience with the installation because each individual had pre-condition ideas of each motif or symbol. They already had a familiarity with each representational form - they already associated with hearts or stars or crowns etc. There was no new world one could escape into, because it was the same world just in a gallery context. I was left with questioning how I could push the heart or the star to achieve a kind of fantasy. After this first phase, I had to reconsider my understanding of what fantasy or escapism was? It seemed that it could only be found in the unknown, the unfamiliar, the beyond representational - perhaps it could be found in the abstract? 

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The installation of 'Castle (2021)' was a really special one because of one moment where a little girl came and interacted with the work. It was very spontaneous and out of the blue, but very rewarding. I suppose I was curious about the ways in which a child would interpret or resonate with the work, it seemed to give me more validation that from an experience of someone my age or older. I think this validation stemmed from my own mourning of childhood and my attempt to reconcile with it or grasp it again. As her interests and interactions with the installation continued, James went on to invited her into our conversation (crit)..... while she has  a lot of things to say about what she would have done differently or things I could have improved, one thing that really stuck with me was when James asked her what she feels about it and she replied "I like that I can see myself in it." Eventually we got to spend a bit of time playing together in the installation, it was interesting how she went around and picked up little things and played with them. She arranged these ceramic hearts and butterflies in little lines and changed around certain items and re-placed them in different areas. I enjoyed watching or observing her interactions because it was genuine and an approach I was far from being able to achieve. The whole installation was an attempt at what she was doing in an instance. By the end, I was left with a little parting gift as she began to leave drawings inside of a book that I had placed within the installation. However, in reflection, it became clear that, that was as far as I could take the project, there needed to be another push - it opened a train of thought about fantasy and what that means now, not only in regards to a child.