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Desire and Descent, 2025
vinyl wood panels, plastic ball pit balls, AV soundtrack and light
The Collective exhibition 'Desire and Descent' was curated to subtly inhabit rather than interrupt, the common room of a student accommodation in Hackney, reflecting the playfulness of the space and creating uncanny disruptions of materiality. Working with the idea of thresholds in Ian McEwan's 'The Cement Garden' flimsy vinyl wood panels to occupy a narrow gap in the ceiling of the entrance hall. The audience enters straight into the installation but are unaware, just until a rogue cough or flicker of light filtering through the boards. They do a double take and look up, to where a gentle soundtrack of coughs, creaky footsteps, and heavy clacking of pool balls, offers the suggestion of something happening out of sight.
The work is decoded further when the audience approaches the final room of the space and encounters a pool table, equipped with what are only revealed to be false pool balls as they bounce and roll of the table, devoid of their familiar weight, movement and heavy clacking sounds. This requires the audience to adjust to disrupted hierachies of materials, and initiate alternative ways of activating the work.
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