Through the Looking Glass...

PATRICIA
In London, I visited lots of the incredible museums you have there, some of which recreate antique house interiors, like the John Soane Museum. That's where I first saw the mirror. It was round and convex. Seeing those interiors through this mirror somehow made the space more real than the re-creation of the ancient space itself. The distortion was fascinating: I imagined how it would be looking at such an image in the 18th century. I got somehow obsessed by this way of seeing.

Living at the Hurst farm, I went almost every day to Clun, the closest village, by bicycle or walking. People told me about a local wood carving studio, over the coffee shop - thousands of wonderful wooden pieces, furniture of all ages, gilded, curved, rounded, with dragon faces and flower shapes. When I spoke to the man who worked there, he showed me his mirrors, too. One of them, covered by dust for years, was perfectly round, beautifully convex and gilded.

"I can lend it to you, if you want, to make your work at the house. I'm sorry the surface is not perfect. it's a 200 year-old mirror. You can keep it as long as you need." So that's how the mirror met John Osborne's house and stayed there, gently, for almost two months.

Its imperfection allowed the reflection of the spaces to be close to painting - the colours brighter, the light more transparent and shiney. Velasquez, Vermeer and Van Eyck came into my head. Or into my view. The mirror became a giant eye hanging from the coloured walls, lying on the floor, knowing corridors and the corners of every single room. It allowed me to look at the house in a totally different way - from a special angle, to become Lewis Carrol's little girl, Alice in Wonderland, stepping into a world with no straight lines.

ARIANE
It's a looking glass world in which you brought two glasses - your camera and a mirror - into John's House. In your reflective displacement, reality becomes a painting and the reflection of the man in a mirror standing in the present becomes a ghost from the past. This is what I see when I look at the photographs you took with your mirror-travelling eye, as it lay on the floor or stared proudly out from the walls.

But the reflections don't stop there. After all, your camera is like a house in some ways too. It houses an empty room with a mirror, catching and caught in the glories of light and space. So house-mirror-camera are linked in infinite regression: a mirror within a chamber, a chamber within a mirror, a house within a house, both containing mirrors and secret rooms.