Fiona Long Art

What's the most intimate space in your home? I bet you'd be happy to show people your master bedroom whilst giving them a tour of your home, but would you ever show them your under sink cupboard? Dark and tight with twisting pipes and hidden odds and ends. Did you ever make dens as a child or hide in cupboards with torches? I am looking at this childhood excitement with exploration and hiding and how this psychoanalytically could cause a kind of claustrophilia or a desire to be absorbed. Could the interlocking pipes be an orgiastic representation? There is certainly something rather seductive about them to me.

In further investigating my interest in orgiastic representations of the inanimate I have started to wonder if it isn’t actually more of an obsession with hidden household infrastructure! I think it comes from a childhood fascination with making dens and finding hidden worlds in cupboards and behind furniture and curtains. There seems a sort of naughtiness in discovering these hidden intricacies. I am going to make a drawing of an orgiastic scene using plumbing parts and when researching this it occured to me that the under sink cupboard is one of the most secret places in the house. When giving people a tour of your home, you probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid at showing them your bedroom but I bet you wouldn’t show them the inside of your under sink cupboard!? This made me think of the Seduced exhibition I recently went to see at the Barbican. It talked of a room called the ’secretum’ where the man of the house would keep his explicit ‘artworks’ so as not to corrupt the minds of women, children, or the uneducated. The under sink cupboard is full of things that you wouldn’t want people to see so perhaps, in a way, it is our modern day secretum! I am also investigating the differences between the animate and inanimate and playing with the meanings of both. I will probably metamorphosise the two, physically and metaphorically. I decided to use plumbing parts in my drawings because of their obvious sexual connotations so I was particularly amused on opening the doors of the under sink cupboard to see the cleaning product bottles apparently gathered, sniffing a junction in the pipe work! Maybe this is just what has happened to my mind in the course of this research!

At the artspace Galleries, Mayfair, London.

Me at the State of the Art competition exhibition at the Royal College of Art in London. My wall painting is one of the 50 finalists.