This work was extremely personal. It was in response to the suicide of teenagers I knew during my time working with ‘at risk’ young people. There were just too many.

I was interested in images that I was left with from speaking with family members and friends who still feel the repercussions years later, and others that had ‘near misses’, to more still that fight the urge on a regular basis. I also came upon the poetry of Stephen Murphy “before you push the chair”.

The image of the chair seemed to cover a lot of what I wanted to say. It represented the everyday, the ever-present yet invisible, the useful, the practical, the disposable, the taken for granted, the comfortable, the supportive, the disposable, the forever.

The choice of material …. At first I used pate de verre process in hot glass, (a technically difficult and prolonged process) to cast the chair, but even with the fragility of the glass, the finished product was still too solid/ permanent so I explored further. I needed something useless, impractical, rendering the chair useless for its intended purpose, something confusing but intriguing, If I could’ve made it out of smoke I would … I experimented with ash, sugar sweet (moulding a life-sized chair from sugar syrup and allowing it to dissolve slowly under the constant drip, drip, drip of water from a kitchen tap… this definitely worked as a piece … but I didn’t document the process or the product, which in a way is the real piece of work for me… but as a tangible object that needed to be viewed I choose sellotape)

This work will be developed further.