![The Room The Room](https://emsbooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/The-Room-2-Emma-Strangwayes-Booth-Artist-707x1024-400x600.jpg)
The Room
2017
Ink Pen on Paper
120x100cm
![In Costume In Costume](https://emsbooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/In-Costume-2017-2-Emma-Strangwayes-Booth-Artist-695x1024-400x600.jpg)
In Costume
2017
Ink Pen on Paper
120x100cm
![Salle d'attente Salle d'attente](https://emsbooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Salle-d-attente-2017-2-Emma-Strangwayes-Booth-Artist-693x1024-400x600.jpg)
Salle d’Attente
2017
Ink Pen an Chinese ink on Paper
120x100cm
![Salle d'accouchment Salle d'accouchment](https://emsbooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Salle-d-accouchment-2017-2-Emma-Strangwayes-Booth-Artist-731x1024-400x600.jpg)
Salle d’Accouchment
2017
Ink Pen on Paper
120x100cm
![Birth Birth](https://emsbooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Birth-2017-2-Emma-Strangwayes-Booth-Artist-677x1024-400x600.jpg)
Birth
2017
Ink Pen on Paper
120x100cm
The Shadow Room
The drawings and subsequent film installation for The Shadow Room is a mix of biography, memory and dreams. It is the re-telling of a singular event in my life.
To make sense of this narrative the persona Bird Girl was created, she references my memory of this time, exploring my unconscious, and subconscious mind. The drawings revisit the body’s history, transforming the memory and healing it.
The mask and costume serve to separate and isolate, but they are there to heal, much like a shaman who’s costume acts as a separation between this world and world of the spirit.
Any horror that is present in my work speaks directly to the violence visited upon the female body, in this instance during pregnancy by those focused on the life of the foetus, often ignoring the woman to whom it is intrinsically linked. I take as inspiration artists such as Frieda Kahlo and Rebecca Horn, whose adversary bodies inform their work.
Depicted in the drawings are fragments of my dreams, weaving a narrative of my subconscious mind. Within the memory room is Bird Girl, a Jungian archetype, a constantly recurring symbol in my work, the shadow she casts represents the dynamism of the self and the alienation between ego and self, in my case the damaged ego-self axis; she is my shadow self.
Using the motif of the crow, she symbolically encapsulates notions of transcendence, rebirth and mortality. Bird Girl’s crow symbolism, is as a mediator animal between life and death.
The artist Susan Hiller’s coined the term ‘paraconceptual’ to describe her exploration of the unconscious and certain phenomena such as automatic writing, dreams and near death experience. I too share her view that the paranormal is often viewed as a de-valued feminine cultural site. Creating this hybrid pollutes the boundaries.
The Shadow Room inhabits a Dionysian landscape, seeking to affirm life, whether it is pain, pleasure, suffering or joy. It is an emotional and instinctive place. Often seen as a female preserve – one I seek to challenge.
By embracing the chaos and savagery of my story I seek its rational balance, emphasising the harmony that can be found within this seemingly chaotic experience.
On a molecular level The Shadow Room resurrects and rebuilds my narrative, in order to make peace with it.