Avalon Plant

BA Fine Art and English Literature

My work consists of 8 paintings (a selection of four shown here) and 8 photographs of my mother’s beautiful Victorian house, her dollhouse, and the parallels between them. I was trying to capture a certain uncanny, haunted atmosphere, influenced by the 18th and 19th century ghost stories I’d been studying. In both settings, I wanted to convey a suggested presence or absence in the scene. Both the dollhouse and the real house are painted on the same scale – the dollhouse enlarged, and the real house made miniaturised. The intended effect is for a confusion between the two.

I wanted to create images that held something within them and were suggestive of an action or movement, just out of the periphery.