The Glass House: she's not owls or flowers
2021 to 2025
Created in collaboration with photographer Keiko Ikeuchi, this series of photographs represents a small selection of a larger body of work that is a companion set to The Garden.
This series in progress draws upon Rotie's interest in Mythology and conjures the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd from The Mabinogion and as reimagined in The Owl Service by Alan Garner. In the Welsh myth Bloedewedd is fashioned and 'birthed' from flowers and made a wife; she is then later punished by her husband and is banished into the night in the form of an Owl who's shrieks and cries will haunt men in their dreams.
The myth acts as a conduit to tell a more personal and contemporary tale of domestic happenings, the uncanny and an implicit violence concealed and yet revealed behind the glass windows. The work also reflects on the modernist architecture of the house and the tradition of Le Courbusier and Mies Van der Rohe where the house acts as a fluid interface between inside and outside and inadvertently reveals, in a cinematic and theatrical frame, what might otherwise be hidden. A final inspiration is the work of Francis Bacon, and the use of the blurring and distortion of the body outline to suggest a revelation of the unconscious. I have aimed to give embodied and visual form to written research that suggests,
''Deleuze argues that Bacon's paintings become non-figurative without being abstract. In this way, painting shows the hysterical struggle of the body to escape from itself in the rhythm of its movement.'' (Geyskens, T.. (2008). Gilles Deleuze on Francis Bacon. Painting as hysteria. 70. 297-316).
The relation between the photographic, the painterly, the cinematic and the theatrical, is deliberately confounded to return the viewer to the felt, embodied subject.