In an English town house, the camera shows the residue of small-scale domestic tasks in forensic detail, lingering on a vacated landing, in a stairwell, at the edge of a work-table, discovering frozen evidence of work interrupted. An audio track serves as a reminder that the quiet dusk, the empty house, the long night, have a melancholy vitality of their own. Between these scenes are interposed the dioramas of a grand metropolitan museum, each a room-sized microcosm of frozen nature where the gaze of petrified beasts meets our own. Paradoxically, the two-dimensional still photograph momentarily reinvests these three-dimensional tableaux of the dead with life.

In The Poetics of Space (1958) Gaston Bachelard connects the ‘humble home’ with a sense of primitiveness, stating that “the house is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word”. Bachelard aims to show that “the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams,” declaring that “past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another.”

Wildbrow Hall is a fictive abode, where the residue of suburban living meets a mythic Nature; where the civilized and the wild interfere. Despite hints, the particular fiction of Wildbrow Hall is not told; the viewer is occupier, master or mistress of all they survey. This may be little or much; the spaces of this or any other house may or may not be taken as contiguous with forest, plain or desert; with the domain of bear, buffalo and lion.

Midnight at Wildbrow Hall was first exhibted at Valokuvakeskus Peri (Peri Centre of Photography), Turku, Finland, 7 - 29 April 2007