'The Empty Room' is newly commissioned work for This Is Not Art Festival 2021 RESPONSE
Oscillating between anxiety, melancholia and ataraxy, this work is a navigation of internal and external milieu of the last eighteen months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Playing with notions of scale, speed and duration, the unknown subject is caught flitting between stagnancy and motion. The stillness of a vacant room is juxtaposed with turbulent yet somehow tranquil oceanscapes, where the subject is surrounded by nought but waves. As the world outside the vacant room passes by in fits and bursts, then drones, the subject is recurrently asocial, isolated, and at the mercy of an anonymised external environment. This solace is volatile; at once it is soothing, unnerving, tiresome and ruminative. Nonetheless, there is beauty and hope here, in the vacant room, in the lapping waves, in the sun streaking through clouds.