Alanna Lawley is fascinated by the fragile ecosystem that exists within the space that one calls ‘home’. She persistently explores practically and theoretically the influence of spatial (architectural) relationships on the individual within domestic environments. This ecosystem, when unbalanced becomes fragmented, fracturing the relationship between ‘home’ and inhabitant. When this occurs, the individual experiences a sense of the ‘Uncanny’ (Freud’s term used to describe the tension that exists between the boundaries of the familiar and unfamiliar), social discord, disassociation, anxiety and isolation.

Alanna explores this fracture primarily by building temporary structures that are representational of an everyday domestic environment, strangely absent of all activity and function. Most recently her works have been created by using fragmented images of interiors from magazines, referencing idealised, aspirational space. The viewer is inhibited from entering or encountering the set, who can instead explore only the single photograph created.

The 2D plane of this surface allows Alanna to manipulate shifts in ones perception allowing only certain (more) familiar aspects of the spaces to register at first glance. Alanna targets the aesthetics associated with the sense of privacy, intimacy and familiarity. In doing so, Alanna seduces the viewer to explore the space in a false sense of security. By isolating space, Alanna creates an environment for constant re-evaluation and reflection. Under closer inspection they reveal an emptiness, lack of function and disorientating sense of scale. Despite a sense of absence, the delayed perception of the rooms’ reality evoke a longing that embraces the melancholic nature of uncertainty and nostalgia, playing with the fragility of the familiar and unfamiliar. More recently her magazine constructions expose a disorientating labyrinth of changing scales and the falsity of these fetishisised interiors.

Through the implementation of confrontational and disorientating boundaries, the viewer is denied the freedom to orientate oneself in a specific time or place; instead permitting the viewer to project their past experiences or desires onto the space. Slowly does the viewer comprehend that they are trapped within a space of ambiguity, only a physical separation, the gesture of moving away allows the viewer their exit point. … Read More