My practice considers ideas of childhood memory and nostalgia through fairy tales, where spectres of characters re-enact an old Scottish fairy tale in traces and fragments. The tale, Habetrot the Spinstress, tells the story of an overbearing mother’s wish to send her idle daughter to the nunnery because she has made no attempt to find a suitable husband. The only way her daughter can prevent this fate lies in the ability to be productive through spinning, and the heroic help of a group of old spinstresses.
I am interested in subtly hinting at different spaces, both interior and exterior environments, alongside fluctuating figurative scale from the near miniature to between child and adult size. Figures and objects accumulate in a tableau format and are based on an acknowledgement of artifice which allow for consideration of the more eerie, ‘everything is not as it seems’ aspect of fairy tales.