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Extended Family comprises of 5 separate pieces:

 

’Day for Night’- video projection inspired by Bernard Palissy’s attempts to find the formula for porcelain and François Truffaut’s 'La Nuit americaine’. Day for night is a filming technique to shot night scenes in daylight. In Truffaut’s 1973 movie, life and fiction are layered, mixed and embedded and the faux night reflects my experience of family.

 

‘Kintsugi’- a living meadow. As a philosophy, Kintsugi treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

 

'People are more fragile than things’- porcelain sculptures influenced by Bruce Chadwin’s ‘Utz, a childhood memory and Judy Chicago’s ‘The Dinner Party’.

 

'Barbe Bleu’- colour photographs. In Charles Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard', a new bride discovers the dead bodies of her predecessors in a locked room. This piece is inspired by my mother and my three step-mothers and makes allusion to Margaret Atwood’s ‘The handmaid tale’ in which women are callously used.

 

‘Laboureur’- photographic print. ‘I watched the collection of soaps grow looking at the pastel colours, the different shapes, noted the smells and wondered at the complexity of the world’.

ALL IMAGES AND TEXT COPYRIGHT MAGA ESBERG 2014

 

 

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EXTENDED FAMILY

 

‘Extended family’ is an installation articulated around real events and the fictions I read and heard from my childhood onwards. The piece looks at the impact of patriarchy from a personal angle. As a child and teenager, I struggled with the nature of family and found ways of escaping in stories.  As an adult daughter, I moved away but remained bound by emotional ties.

 

This piece was developed following the death of my parents, looking for closure. I have put together characters, materials, and ideas from writers, film-makers, and artists to materialize the blurred boundary between fiction and 'reality' and express the scope of human experience.

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