Curatorial Statement:
This series unfolds within the peculiar stillness of nocturnal artifice. The setting—a dimly lit terrace populated by baroque statues, garden furniture, and seasonal emptiness—functions as both stage and enclosure. At its center is a woman clad in garnet silk, her posture alternately composed, weary, amused, and inscrutable. The apple she holds reappears, passed between frames not as prop but as punctuation. Its saturated hue resists metaphor even as it summons it.
She does not act. She waits, leans, reclines. Her gestures are not theatrical but taut with suggestion. The effect is not one of drama but of latency—of something not yet begun or something just concluded. In this suspension, time folds. She is neither wholly mythological nor strictly modern. The drapery of her dress echoes classical figuration, but the electric light—brutal and unnatural—prevents her from dissolving into aesthetic memory. Instead, she lingers awkwardly in a space where narrative has not settled.
The terrace is devoid of others, yet dense with implication. The chairs face no one. The sculpture, captured in dim relief, mimics her outline without acknowledging her presence. And so she remains unaccompanied. Her solitude is not romantic but structural; the world around her is composed, even ornamental, but devoid of human warmth. This absence is not melancholic. It is simply ambient, a condition rather than a mood.
The apple, held and untouched, might suggest a choice. But the series avoids conclusion. It offers no Eden, no exile. Instead, it lingers in the in-between: between sculpture and gesture, between opulence and alienation, between the symbolic and the literal. In this liminal orchard, the familiar iconography of femininity is neither embraced nor subverted—it is quietly restaged, with no need for resolution.
List of Photos at Saatchi Gallery with Links
