Into the Woods (2004) inflatable Sculpture, Bar Seven Gallery, Nottingham.
Into the Woods
Into the Woods was my first installation — a large inflatable sphere, one metre in diameter, lit from within by cold cathode lighting, installed at Bar Seven Gallery in Nottingham.
It marks the beginning of my long-term engagement with inflatable forms: structures built from ripstop nylon that occupy space softly, that glow rather than sit, that feel temporary and dreamlike in a room.
Ripstop nylon is a parachute material — designed to arrest a fall, to hold air, to carry a person safely through an uncertain descent. Filled with air it becomes a form, without it, it collapses to nothing. There is something in that quality that felt right from the beginning: a material that is both resilient and entirely dependent on what you put into it, that holds its shape only as long as you keep breathing life into it.
The title came from a feeling I knew well — of being lost inside something, of not being able to find the obvious path that everyone else seemed to be following. I was processing a dyslexia diagnosis at the time, and there was something in the image of the woods that felt true: not a threatening place, but a disorienting one. A place where the usual signs don't quite work, where you navigate differently, where getting lost can lead somewhere unexpected.
There is something about dyslexia that is fundamentally about visual perception — the way text shifts and destabilises on the page, the way a test or a form or a set of instructions can suddenly become a hostile landscape where nothing holds still. The experience of trying to read under pressure, of the page refusing to cooperate, has a lot in common with looking at something and not being able to trust what you see. That territory — between seeing and understanding, between looking and knowing — has been at the centre of my work ever since.
For someone who spent years in education feeling like the wrong shape for the space they were in, making things wasn't optional. It was urgent. A need to prove something — to myself as much as anyone — and a compulsion that no amount of logic could argue away. This work was the first time I gave that compulsion a physical form.
The sphere itself — glowing, self-contained, found in the middle of a gallery — was my answer to that feeling. Not a map. Something you move around, look into, experience from the outside and imagine the inside of.