Catie Newell

Curfew, Catie Newell

Curfew is a site specific installation provoking the loss of a larger space to fleeting apparitions of darkness and memory. Simply, the work is ghosting a darkened window, made of strange and violent spacial lines embedded with candlewicks burnt away and trailing smoke true to the term curfew (rooting in the French term 'to cover the fire' - it's the time to blow out the candles and go to bed). Fleeting and vanishing (both physically and in memory) the line work is a dance between the fewest lines that can be trusted, and the imagination projected on to a darkened reality. Suspended in the threshold between the two spaces, visitors to the show have to occupy the work - literally walking through it. Formally the aim is to evoke a larger sense of space (both real and imagined) and also calling to question the passing from one space to another - where perhaps on both sides, different darknesses exist. Its implications and threat of vanishing is the unknown reality, one that seems familiar, though always unfamiliar. Curfew remains something that is there amongst us, but anxious fleeting, and aggressive, though even frightened in its own being.