Single channel video, 12 min, colour and b/w, sound, 2007-8

Long influenced by the short story The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1899), I came across the iconography from the Salpêtrière Hospital during my artist residency in Paris (2007). I was immediately taken in by these photographs, which seemed so implausible and even humorous at first but soon revealed their dark side of a painful history indelibly linked to the invention of photography and the colonial ethnographic projects that were well underway in the late 19th century.
Working along with Paris based dancer and choreographer Marion Perrin, I began to develop the series of auto-portraits which has resulted in the Hysteria: Iconography from the Salpêtrière Series of photographs.

In this video that developed along side the photo series - we move constantly between the past and the present, an affinity that links us to the women trapped by the ‘hospitality’ of the Salpêtrière. Following the last entry made on Augustine (Charcot’s pet patient) at the hospital on September 9, 1880: she "escaped from the Salpêtrière, disguised as a man", we follow the protagonist to Rue Charcot in Paris where she defaces public property using graffiti to finally leave a trace of her feelings, “there is always something absent that torments me.” (Il y a toujours quelque chose d'absent qui me tourmente - Camille Claudel)