UNKNOWN WOMEN 2010 - 2015
Private Collection
The setting for this work was a Ladies Room in the old Streatham Hill Theatre where I had studios for over 20 years.
A showgirl prepares for the midnight show, regarding herself in the hand mirror, lipstick in hand. She scrutinises her appearance, but remains unknown to us. We scan beyond the costume of the character she is preparing to assume to the various scattered objects for clues.
A phone number beside the eyelashes stuck on the mirror, a shopping list post-it below her reflected breasts adorned with pasties. Pills, fags and glasses on the dressing table. A photo of children and their drawings.
I've made work for years about interim spaces, concealed labour and withdrawn, unknown. The quiet mystery of a head which will never turn, intimate yet remote, the face forever unseen, is a subject I have found myself drawn to investigate repeatedly.
My figures may seem frozen in a place of stasis and reflection, in the eye of the storm, attempting to reconfigure themselves & perhaps on the cusp of transformation. In Dressing Room this switch is explicit.