In these works of art I aim to create spaces of visual seduction and psychological entrapment. Devices from the seventeenth century, the Baroque formal garden and its vegetative arabesques, the bastionated polygonal fortification, quadratura and anamorphic perspective, are some of my starting points. Such apparently disparate forms are linked in that they each manipulate the perception of space in order to entice and disorient the viewer.

I have reconfigured my sources using symmetry, repetition and anamorphic perspective, to make secretive, armoured enclosures that invite exploration yet forbid entry. I play with the common principles of the confinement and dispersal of lines of sight as a means of structuring space. I have aimed to realise a vision of distorted space that can relate to the scale of the body of the viewer and the building, and can mediate between these. The resulting optical sphincters, part garden, part fortress, part death-star, perforate the architectural surface. In concave space, they are incisions or orifices, thus ‘Post-Op’, in convex space, they are scars or protrusions, thus ‘Post-Op’; they play with optical and decorative effects that hypnotise and perplex, thus, again, ‘Post-Op’.

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Hortus (in)conclusus. An unclosed garden disclosed. A garden which cannot be concluded; a garden unbound and unbounded. An inconclusive garden, occluded, clouded, ocular. A not-garden. An undecidable garden... perhaps.