Charley Peters Visual Artist

When Dorothy was transported from her monochrome existence in Kansas to the technicolour of Oz, her home became both her means of escape from the mundane, and the site of her reawakening to reality.

My practice explores interior spaces; both a physical, architectural space, and also an interior, imaginative space. The domestic interior becomes a container that is subject to the dialectics of inside/outside, a metaphoric representation of the myths associated with the body, the artist, and the protagonist in existing narratives. Strange and disjointed events parody childhood fantasies but are sometimes suggestive of the desires and confusions that lie beneath the adult psyche and adult experiences.

The work is concerned with telling or suggesting stories. It is connected with existing tales that are told about women and with the construction of new narratives. As well as being the subject of the stories, I am also concerned with being their author; my images are constructed solely by me through the assembly of props, the acting-out and recording of events, and by often featuring in the final images myself. The work suggests the performance of private dramas when the narrative space is turned inward to the domestic; the psychic location of desire and anxiety, and the private space of feelings.

The images and the stories that they suggest are built around processes of make-believe. There is often playfulness within the images themselves with the artist shown to be mimicking childlike games or fantasies, and the careful process of constructing the images also attempts to hide the whole truth of the situation from the viewer, thus challenging perceptions of what is real. For children, play is in part an escape from reality and in part a rehearsal for adult life. My recent work, where the domestic is disrupted and the events within fictionalised, tells tales of adult experiences and relationships through the language of lost childhood and its performance. The stories told fall somewhere between actuality and make-believe, horror and wonder, reality and dreams, Kansas and Oz.

All images © Charley Peters. Any unauthorised reproduction or copying of images is a breach of copyright

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