Ofelea and the Flying Balloons Photograph

Ofelea and the Flying Balloons is part of a larger body of work titled 'Ofelea'. This project is a portrait of my imagination and memories, often twisted by the dark underlying layers of the storybooks I read as a child. The series of pictures is a juxtaposition of the Freudian theory of 'The Uncanny', the constantly recurring mysterious environments in the Surrealist art movement and reconstructions of my distant childhood imagination. The feeling of the uncanny, as Sigmund Freud points out, is one of confused fear, something that you feel when confronted with something that was meant to remain hidden, locked away and has now come out into the open. This feeling is certainly not unambiguous. It is this ambiguity itself that makes the mind wander. The wandering mind opens many doors. Behind these closed doors lies what we call the imagination. There are more doors behind the ones that have been opened. They all whisper to each other – about what lies beyond – engaging and gripping the psyche. These images are constructed using fragments of recollections – often uncanny – from my childhood, stitched up by the secret and powerful tool of ‘day-­‐dreaming’ and also with the careful understanding of Sigmund Freud’s essay, ‘Das Unheimliche’. They lie somewhere between reality and fantasy, between the conscious and the sub-­‐conscious. These images are not only a reflection of what I saw behind the ‘closed doors’ of my mind, but also of what I could have seen. Researched and shot over a period of nine months, this project has involved long aimless walks in the woods in Kent, meeting strange people and finding myself in remote and isolated places as a result of which my dreamscapes and memory gave me rather peculiar visuals. Intricate study of the art and writings of the surrealists and re-­‐visiting my very old storybooks helped me give perspective to the Freudian philosophy of the uncanny. Rather than illustrating the uncanny, the idea here is to give the viewer an experience of the uncanny by extracting fragments of desires and fantasies buried within the sub-­‐conscious.