Sephaville – Project Statement

My intention is to introduce a series of characters, locations and motifs that create a self-contained narrative. The unfolding fables will fully exploit their visual format, providing a universal language that lies beyond the shackles of text. For example, one image may contain a foreground formation of figures that resembles a flock of birds hidden in the background of another one, thus indicating a sense of some underlying order within the world being created. Birds, nudes, harlequins, ballet dancers and night-lit cityscapes have already featured during our journey through Sephaville.

My residency at Aberdeen Arts Centre, Scotland, over summer 2007 helped to nurture these ideas. I was lucky enough to meet the folklore storyteller Stanley Robertson at The Elphinstone Institute, and to explore His Majesty’s Theatre archives with the author and archivist Edi Swan, as well as seeing the art centre’s own theatre and dance programme.

The city itself was also an inspiration. Although Aberdeen is in fact coastal, the neo-classic and gothic architecture that towers over the cosmopolitan population does little to suggest this to the uninitiated, rendering the oversized and over-fed herring gulls that fly between these buildings an unusual spectacle. This appealed to my interest in magical-realist literature and films such as Pans Labyrnith, Sleepy Hollow, The Shining, Perfume and The Cremaster Cycle.