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Card (Marlboro Carton), Adhesive, Laser Cutting
When looking at the brief for the exhibition, I was drawn to making something a physical object as a starting point. I was thinking very much of the cigarette packet as a mass produced constructed object, and a container.
It was it’s function as a container, and something with an internal and external
space that interested me. Here was a box, a small iconic container.
I had always admired the precision and crispness in the design of a cigarette carton. As a child I often used, among other things used cigarette cartons to make things (both my parents smoked heavily at the time),
I thought of the scale of the cigarette box, something designed with the body in mind, yet small enough to be concealed about the body.
I had already started to work with model houses after a friend had got me a
cardboard model kit house as a present, the kind used for model railways
It occurred to construct something in complete contrast to a cigarette carton and its designated function, so I decided to make a small replica of an architectural structure or building, something very distinctive.
I began looking at buildings as appropriate models, and fixed on american flatboard houses. Marlboro, although originally an English brand, is strongly identified and marketed as american. While I began looking at classic American houses (particularly those along the east coast in Maine and Conetticut) similar to the gothic houses in Edward Hoppers’ paintings, it occurred to me that the most iconic American building of that type was from popular cinema rather than art, namely the house designed for Alfred Hitchcocks’ Psycho.
The minute scale of the model is again a contrast to the size of the house as it appears in the film, yet still menacing because of it’s cinematic references.
The irony of choosing the Bates House was that I later discovered that the house was never a real existing building, but a three quarter external studio set constructed entirely for the film.
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