Sweet Dreams Are Made of This

This body of work grew out of exploring the intimacy with unknown and unknowable others imbued in the discarded mattresses I found on the nature strips of the suburbs where I lived and travelled to University in 2011. I was interested in exploring the quirks of the lifecycle of a mattress. The ornate casing incongruous with its place out of sight beneath bedding quickly becomes soiled by stains of use; bodily fluids, food and drink and some unidentifiable. These marks made by bodies present a kind of taboo, inside the home the mattress is rarely exposed and once discarded the stains mark it out as dirty, and undesirable. I liked the idea of turning this rejected, abject material into something desirable. The coats and jackets I constructed were pure flights of fancy. Drawing on many years of admiration for high fashion, objects I could never touch or own. And so unwittingly these pieces became a kind of manifestation of that gap between aspirational longing and reality. I was delighted when people wanted to try them on, wrapping themselves in material that they would normally avoid if at all possible because the desire to see themselves dressed in these garments had won over any disgust felt by touching another person’s bodily fluids. I found it comical, and it seemed to me to speak of the complexities of consumption, desire, glamour and disgust with our humanness at the same time. I explored this link with fashion and consumer culture further, by creating a kind of celebrity endorsement campaign. It was important to me that the celebrities chosen’s fame had already peaked and yet whom I considered to be ‘safe advertising choices’. I used contemporary photos of them as I could source online as the basis for the series of oil paintings, depicting the celebrities in my coats against neutral backgrounds as if in a studio shoot.