Through working in 3 dimensions, certain every-day objects have revealed themselves to be intrinsically eloquent,

able to express an inexhaustible array of situations, ideas and emotions. Through familiarity gained from repeated

experiments in a variety of media, I think the dress is such an object. Unnervingly responsive, a simply-cut girl's

dress seems eager to communicate on any level asked of it.

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While immediate pleasure can be had from allowing the eye to freely roam the reassuring folds, hollows and

gathers, an empty dress, frozen in fibreglass and time, can simultaneously express both the concept of personal

identity and the ensuing emotion following the sudden loss of it.

The static dress records the moment of fissure (the fibreglass has ice-like cracks, the remains of a previous

life are pushed out) while the empty space within the dress howls with some kind of longing to repair the break.

Whilst contemplating a total absence of body, all I can see is body.

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A hollow white cotton dress stands unadorned, defiant, and talks of abandonment, the attempted corruption of

innocence (failed), the deep-cut disappointments of childhood, the gleeful triumph of spirit over bondage,

vanity, and most excitingly of all, again, the immediate and irrefutable invokation of a physical

presence.

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Like a shape-shifter, an empty dress of natural latex mutates and adapts easily. Behaving as a conduit between

the inner and outer self, the skin becomes clothing, the body becomes its own armour.

Quite like watercolour or newly-dead skin, the unsettling quality of the medium only seems to speak of

missing bodies when manipulated into small garments.

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An empty dress can signify the start and end of life - the christening gown, the death shroud - and all stages

in-between.