After reading about another missing child, Collishaw started work on Ganymede. He projected a video of a boy being snatched by an eagle onto smoke emitting from an old gothic font. As the smoke emerged and waned the image of the child and his captor appeared and disappeared tauntingly.
Many Victorian fairy paintings contain sinister elements of violence contrasting with their otherwise enchanting and ethereal qualities.
Collishaw borrowed some of these characters to perform in a three-dimensional Zoetrope, an updated version of a Nineteenth Century animation device. As the machine rotates, an animated scene appears that is both compelling and unsavoury.
Like many acts of violence in painting or the cinema it is easy to become emotionally detached to vicious behaviour. The Zoetrope’s uncannily fast revolution evokes the rush of adrenaline triggered by outbreaks of violence.
These tree stumps, cast in resin and created for a show held in Sigmund Freud’s study, contain record players designed to play seven and twelve inch vinyl records.
The records’ surfaces are printed with the ringed cross-section of a tree. It is said that each ring represents a year of a tree’s life and that their organic structure contains data that can be read to gain an understanding of a tree’s history.
Pressed onto the records is the sound of birdsong, ending with the sound of Lyre-birds imitating a chainsaw. The recording was reversed when pressed to allow the stumps to play from the inside to the outside edge of the disc.