Collage 22

“It comes in three bits. This bit on the left, which is my childhood, and then this end bit which is my dreams, and then the middle bit is my reality now. In the first bit I used a picture of a colony of penguins, and they’re all the same. When I moved to live with my mum, I felt that I was different and everyone else was the same. That’s me, and that’s my shadow. It represents me as a child being scared. The lion represents anything scary. There was a lot of disorder, a lot of fear. This up here represents the communication I didn’t have with the people around me (a field of satellite dishes). This eye here – I was very paranoid and I used to think there were cameras in the corners of my room, and I used to think I was being spied on. It was without end, it was going on and on. This bit on the right hand side, I’ll move on to that because when I was young I had dreams and expectations to live a nice tranquil life. Flowers represent nice things, the birds nice things, the gold nice things. And then this bit here in the middle is my reality. As I got older I became a woman on an island. That’s me most of the time, in a cage. The TV: I spend my time watching TV. There’s a lot of control that comes through the TV. I put that there because if we watch a lot of TV they are controlling you and you become a sheep”.