“Observatory Mansions”
Welcome to “Observatory Mansions”. Loosely inspired by Edward Carey’s 2000 novel 'Observatory Mansions,' this series draws from the novel's essence—a once-magnificent ancestral estate now crumbling in a marsh. While Carey's story centers on eccentric misfits living in isolated silence, I have taken the title and the concept of a deteriorating house to conjure my own haunted tale with unique characters. The novel's atmosphere captivated me, blending the spirit of a Wes Anderson film with gothic splendor. This inspired me to create a narrative through whispers of memory and a fog of melancholy. To me, haunted places are like books, filled with the stories of those who came before. In the presence of ghosts, time stands still, and the past becomes the present.
Meeting several characters along the way, they guide you through a realm of the in-between within an abandoned, once beautiful and lively home. A house of reminiscence, now haunted by its former residents who relive their past through present phantasmagorias, unable to move on. These works explore the interplay between the physical and the ethereal, the real and the remembered.
As you journey through the series, you start by climbing through a window, descending a staircase, exploring the salon, then venturing down to the grotto, moving up to a bedroom, and finally arriving outside at the gate, where you are greeted by the house itself.
This series consists of six large black and white paintings on wood panels, and a painted 17th-century reliquary candelabra.
“A ghost is a manifestation of longing. As anyone who has known loss understands, lack is not an absence at all, but a presence. A person we love dies, leaves, or changes, and a gap forms. It takes on their shape, mimics their movement, and echoes their voice like a mockingbird. We feel this gap take up space, filling every place our lost one once was, and now isn’t. It reflects in mirrors and flickers in candle flames—a phantom. And ghosts? Not only do they breach the literal boundary between our world and the Otherworld, but they cross the boundary of time too. They are, in their very bodies (or lack thereof) inhabiting the present and the past at once.
“A ghost is a memory.”
— Gennarose Nethercott
“Invitation”
120 x 90 x 4 cm
Acrylic on Wood Panel
2024
Your journey into “Observatory Mansions” begins not at the front door, but through a window. A silent portal. Here, in the gothic tower, a woman stands bathed in a pale light, staring out eternally. Forever awaiting a reunion that remains just out of reach. Her eyes, filled with infinite longing, meet yours, extending a delicate yet guarded invitation to climb inside and join her timeless vigil.
“Endless Descent”
120 x 90 x 4 cm
Acrylic on Wood Panel
2024
Inspired by a Michel Picard photograph, this painting depicts a journey deeper into the house. A Tudor woman, draped in a backless velvet gown, descends a spiral staircase. Her spectral skin emits a faint glow in the cavernous space, while her bat-winged candelabra casts shifting shadows on the stone walls, resembling a pitchfork. Adorned with a beaded pearl headpiece, she remains rigid and upright, ensnared in a relentless cycle, perpetually trapped in the echo of her fall from centuries past.
“It’s All Forgotten Now”
120 x 90 x 4 cm
Acrylic on Wood Panel
2024
Inspired by the haunting melody of Al Bowly's song, this painting conjures a past life within an abandoned neoclassical salon. The windows stand open as the curtains billow across the tiled floor. Amidst the wilted flowers and decay, an ivory angel rises from her embroidered chair in a state of transfiguration. Her face, shrouded in lamentation and delirium, recalls a long-forgotten costume ball from which she never departed. The room, steeped in forgotten grandeur, echoes with the faint strains of a long-lost song, enveloping the space in a profound sense of loss.
“Subterranean Echoes”
120 x 90 x 4 cm
Acrylic on Wood Panel
2024
In the deepest depths of Observatory Mansions stands the only living resident—the caretaker. In a grotto beneath the house, he stands cloaked in thick felt amidst jagged stalactites and stalagmites. Dim light casts stark, dramatic shapes, illuminating his solitary figure. The atmosphere is eerie, the air thick with the echoes of dripping water and distant, indistinct sounds. Haunted by what he has witnessed, he fears the spectral residents and chooses to reside below, isolated from the dwellings above. Arriving at the mansion a skeptic, he is now a rotting, perpetual shadow in the rhymes of the midnight hour.
“Glory Box”
120 x 90 x 4 cm
Acrylic on Wood Panel
2024
Inspired by the Portishead song, this painting depicts a bedroom scene where the boundaries between the afterlife and the dream world dissolve into a present illusion. Antique chinoiserie wallpaper comes to life, with hands emerging from the grey garden patterns, cradling flowers, insects, and birds. In the foreground, a silver mistress sleeps amidst a sea of silk, her limbs intertwined with those around her. Another woman peeks through the door, her gaze filled with curiosity and temptation, as she contemplates joining the phantasmic pleasure tableau.
“Observatory Mansions”
120 x 90 x 4 cm
Acrylic on Wood Panel
2024
Inspired by Magritte and his 27 variations of "Empire of Light,” this painting concludes the series, presenting a view of the house as a whole. An enigmatic presence in the night, a sublime abyss in the wilting garden, glimmering with the scattered ashes of time. Amongst the moonlit foliage and urns atop the open wrought-iron gate, lies the path between here and then. The house, alive with its windows aglow, whispers in the depths of its dark shrubbery, both inviting and foreboding. It represents a perpetual purgatory, calling from the void in its crowded vacancy. An empty bliss beyond this world.
“A Thud in the Night”
28.5 x 15 x 8 cm
Acrylic on a wooden 17th-century reliquary candelabra.
2024
This piece, once a sacred object in a church in Ischia, Italy, now finds its place within the mansion. As a reliquary, it once housed sacred relics. Such as dust or pebbles from Biblical sites, tiny fragments of hair, clothing, or bones of those deemed saints and martyrs. Now empty, its compartment holds only the echoes of its past. Suspended in the mansion, it traps a spirit within, forever confined to observe the hauntings from the corridor, watching former residents glide by in embers.
