Scentimental, 2011

Jersey War Tunnels

One of my early large-scale installations, exhibited at the Jersey War Tunnels, examined the lasting imprint of the Second World War on personal identity. The work brought together family mementos, archival photographs, found objects and a mannequin figure within a carefully constructed tableau. Period music by the 19th-century Jewish composer Richard Tober, who escaped the concentration camps, played in the background, while a projected film depicted a bride who had lost her betrothed in the war, a meditation on absence, loss and suspended futures.

A central sculptural bodice of a woman, featured a wartime gas mask adorned with dried flowers. Its eye sockets were filled with pearls, symbolic of tears, but also of eggs that never came to be. Through delicate floral arrangements, I introduced feminine structures into this product of war, rendering it ethereal, ghostlike and intertwined with nature. The sculpture suggested a woman transformed by war, shifting the gas mask from a symbol of protection into one of fragility and interrupted lineage, a quiet reflection on futures that were never realised.

The installation physically mapped my own lineage: my paternal and maternal histories were positioned on opposing sides, connected by invisible threads that linked the printed screens embedded within the picture frames, meeting at the centre through my own generation. It was a work about inheritance, not only of objects, but of memory, silence and emotional residue.

By combining sound, sculpture, moving image and spatial arrangement, I created an environment that visitors stepped into rather than simply observed. That early recognition shaped the foundation of my practice. I am passionate about creating multisensory environments that investigate how history lives within us, not to define us but to echo the personal stories within collective experience.