:: SARAH-MACE DENNIS :: Statement ::

My work explores the known, the unknown, and the feeling that takes place somewhere between these two states. I am interested in the complexity of archeological digs - the exposing of objects that once belonged to someone; that once meant something. My work uncovers things and reconstructs their meaning, imbuing it with abstract significance. It deals with the haunting of things that cannot be fully comprehended and the complexity of a reality that is based on myth.

Much of my work is set inside disused houses, landscapes and institutions, and the traces of experience that are left long after these spaces are abandoned. But when I go to these places I'm not just digging things up. Sometimes they pass by me or I stumble across them, flinching at the interruptions I didn't realize were there at first. I make connections between objects and the ghostly signifiers that often layer old spaces. The narratives I weave are partly constructed through oral history, and partly from sensations that seem so far beyond the ‘real' it is questionable as to whether they even exist.

Sometimes it feels like the photographic, filmic and textual surfaces that I work with and the very notion of time are one and the same thing: an un-measurable valley where things living and dead appear and disappear at will. Art making and storytelling are sometimes like magic – people and places present and absent in the same instant.