Combining two key elements, drawing and installation, Bound investigates notions of psychological repression and the shadow self – our internal critic. Referencing Rorschach’s inkblots, the exhibition is in part composed of ink drawings derived from the artist’s bound hands, embodying this unpleasant companion via multiple ‘faces’.

Bound is structurally and aesthetically designed so that the audience must enter the installation as though becoming an actor in a stark, high-contrast theatre.

The tense relationship between the black chair with its fabric ties and the black and white images on the opposing wall forms the main subject of the work.

As the drawings become a psychologists diagnosis, so too the chair becomes a psychologists chair. Unwitting and perhaps unwilling, the audience itself becomes the subject of analysis.

 

 

By using the potential of art as both social and personal therapeutic methodology for exploring psychological states, Bound aims to speak to a broader human experience; that of feeling entrapped by, and attempting to escape or at least understand the confines of one’s individual consciousness.

There are things that bind us, hold us back and yet are still an integral part of who we are. At what cost do we surrender our darkness?