These rather elliptical photographs are all I have to immortalise the installation I built for my MA show back in 1998. Somewhere, there is a short film too, called 17 Silks and a Stepladder, which documents the making of the installation, but I can’t find it. Maybe it will resurface one day, as these photographs have surfaced. I hope so, as putting this installation together was great fun and I was very excited by the process at the time.
You’ll have to take my word for it then when I tell you the installation comprised all these curved ribbons of organza, themselves screen-printed with a near-transparent writing that only became visible when illuminated. The organza voiles were suspended from sinuous metal rods that connected together to produce longer ribbons. The rods were suspended from the ceiling of a black-walled photography studio, on lengths of nylon wire, meaning the organza ribbons appeared to levitate in space. The effect was to produce a labyrinth of diaphanous corridors; then, three concealed slide-projectors beamed images onto, and through the hanging layers of sheer fabric, the images changing as the carousels moved around on timers.
The goal of the installation was to manifest a memory-space, with both the writing and the images belonging to the remembrances of other people – written and pictorial accounts of their own beloved and most Proustian objects. An ambient soundtrack, comprising these same individuals’ voices, played on a long, unhurried loop. Visitors to the installation could walk between the long drops of water-marked organza, lost inside, while all the time the visuals shifted and defocused, and different fragments of the written words become more visible and less so.
It was big, immersive and dreamlike, and I was very lucky to be given free rein to build it. It was another early attempt to open a portal or produce phantasmagoria – that beguiling idea (for me at least), that behind some ordinary door in a not-so remarkable building, something wonderful is happening.
Red's Kingdom 
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