Evie Ukairo

The Figure In The Fireplace, 2026

(The familiar and the unfamiliar) 

Air dry clay, paint, metal, string, plexiglass, oil pastel, felt pen, acetate, wire, grass, card, wood, glass, pva glue, PLA. 

This work is based on the idea of the entrapment of our own perception, which is strictly a human one. Reading the works of David E. Cooper made me consider whether questions that remain unanswered to human beings will remain unanswered because they are outside the borders of our own perception. Art research is fundamentally the process of allowing the interruption of a solely isolated art process by the viewing of external sources. These sources can be born from other perceptions that interact with your own. You are, in a way, allowing a ‘stranger’ into your mind. 

Although your perception can be altered by external influence, it will always remain your own and you can never escape this. Existing then, is the intriguing darkness beyond our human perception, and the questions that we can never even begin to imagine the answers to because they lie beyond this.

The figure in the fireplace intends to represent what lives outside the borders of your perception. It appears as a stranger that you have come upon in your living room. 

This installation itself works as if a dream. Dreams bring awareness to the fact that the acknowledgement of a long held memory is actually a feeling that is very easy to be created by the brain in a split second. The feeling that something has happened all your life and is familiar to you can be plastered on any old thing in a dream, and therefore must be looked at differently in terms of properties like accuracy, fragility and easiness of birth. In this art piece, the stage becomes a dream, the setting and the familiar are suddenly your own, and the figure is the only stranger. ‘The familiar and the unfamiliar’.