Mixed Media Instillation (2025)

In this project, I created an immersive fictional archive exploring folklore, belief, and the relationship between storytelling and perceived truth. The work combined fictional writing, sculpture, painting, illustration, textiles, sound, and installation to construct the mythology of a fictional creature known as “Th Unbidden.” I created drawings and sculptures resembling ancient artefacts and biological evidence, alongside fictional folklore accounts, recovered diary entries, and online testimonies describing encounters with the creature. I also composed and recorded a folk song inspired by Appalachian storytelling traditions, presenting it as another fragment of this invented history. The work was exhibited as a museum-style archive, complete with texts written from the perspective of a fictional folklorist and researcher, Nathaniel Kettering.

By presenting these fictional materials with the seriousness and authority of historical documentation, I explored how context influences belief and how gallery and museum spaces often carry expectations of truth and authenticity.

Through this project, I explored how context influences belief and how institutional spaces such as galleries and museums often carry an expectation of truth and authenticity. By creating a fictional world and presenting it through the conventions of research, preservation, and display, the work questioned the boundaries between fact and fiction, imagination and documentation, and professional presentation and playful invention. The project also reflects my wider practice of combining multiple mediums and rejecting the limitations of a single artistic form in favour of immersive world-building and storytelling.