Wail

Wail 2007 1,990 papier-mâché balls made from shredded client notes; plastic line; metal curtain rod and rings; spotlights and shadows

An installation inspired by William Henry Fox Talbot's first successful photograph, re-considered within the digital paradigm. A suspended curtain of papier-mâché balls is arranged in a loose grid to resemble Talbot’s Latticed Window negative (1835). The paper balls are made from shredded client notes I kept during the ten years or so I worked as a counsellor. Like the indexical tie of a photographic image to its referent, these paper objects are materially and metaphorically linked to the confidential concerns of my clients: private, introspective, fragmentary, veiled. The work took almost a year to make by hand, a strange reconstitution of time in photography, and a slow labour that translates their secrets into another, emblematic, code.