The End of Predictable Ambitions is one of a thematically linked group of installations that explore the expression of female identity and bodily experience. This work shares a poetic and theatrical sensibility that incorporates fluid elements within my installation language. Like Levitation: Dissolving Old Words That Live Under The Breath, this installation incorporates found “feminine” domestic furniture with fountain apparatus that spouts black ink to evoke the notion of obscuring, dissolving and rewriting the body.
A small feminine wardrobe sits in a pool of black ink with an image of Mt Everest veneered on one of its doors as the stereotypical vision of ambition, achievement and conquest. The wardrobe represents the private interior space where identity is adjusted and maintained each day, which is contrasted with the stereotypically antiquated Everest image as public exterior. The door is ajar revealing the internal mechanisms travelling throughout the body of the wardrobe to the fountain head in the roof of the wardrobe. The black ink in the pool is circulated to the top of the wardrobe where it flows out in a dark watery veil over the Everest peaks, eclipsing and disrupting the image. A dual process of dissolving old “scripts” and writing the intangible, unformed and unspoken is enacted.
