‘Designed to Shop…’ was a piece of work I installed for a show in DIG, in Lewisham. I replicated in wood, a retail display unit that was available for purchase intended and advertised for a jewellery boutique. I made it slightly smaller than to scale that gave a sensation of the real, but was slightly off, but not significantly enough to become comical or distracting. There were various other images of empty display units and mechanisms I sourced from a catalogue for retailers to purchase for their stores. This enactment of displaying display is intriguing. By recreating this retail catalogue on, around and throughout my replicated boutique display (also present in this catalogue) the work became a displayed display, on a display.
From pound shops and shopping malls to viral internet-marketing campaigns and online shopping, my practice probes the experience of shopping, the structures and motifs of retail environments, and the muddling yet jarring realms of private and public space. I play with my perceived imbalances of value and ownership and question the appeal of objects in a continually upgrading society, by creating surreal replications out of the peculiarity of our reality. By imitating forms, signs and systems that are part of our experience of daily life, I try to find a space of slippage that confuses, yet reinforces, our reality of Capitalist culture.