'A View From Inside’ (2011 – work in progress)
I am currently working with a number of people diagnosed with conditions like Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder that lead to episodes in which the person's sense of reality is altered in some way. The project will result in a series of ten photographic portraits that collectively question our common assumptions about what constitutes ‘reality’.

Historically portraits have been constructed as a celebration of the uniqueness of an individual and his or her accomplishments. These images, all located in eighteenth century country house settings, reference historical paintings in which the sitter is aggrandized and dignified by the setting. In this series of portraits the people are depicted ‘normally’ but the ornate settings in which they are located are digitally manipulated and incongruous props are introduced to represent some of the altered states of reality experienced during psychosis.

The ten framed exhibition prints, each measuring 76 x 100cm will be accompanied by a hardback book. Details available shortly...

The project is supported by an AHRC research fellowship.

'Heart of the Matter' is an installation consisting of eight channels of spoken voice and one HD video projection. (In the work-in-progress exhibition documented here the video is displayed on a wide screen monitor). The video shows close up footage of a generic heart operation. This mechanical, materialistic image of the heart is offset by the fragments of emotive narratives heard from each of the eight speakers arranged around the space. From each speaker a woman is heard talking about a personal relationship or event ranging from the death of a partner, abandonment and loss to the intimate experiences of pregnancy and family life. The narratives are fragmented and overlapping so that it is difficult to follow any one story amongst the cacophony of voices heard. The effect is simply of being in an intensely emotional space in which the women are sharing some ‘heartfelt’ experiences that draw attention to the function of the heart as our emotional centre. The narratives, spoken by actors, are all edited from the personal accounts of women I interviewed for the project.

This work is part of a larger interdisciplinary art/science project looking at the psycho-social effects of heart transplantation based at Toronto General Hospital.