Suky Best has a long-running fascination with the clash occasioned by encounters between well-groomed domestic interiors and nature run wild. In The Journey Home (1999) she ‘wanted to make an image as if the room was being menaced by vegetation…Trees might burst through windows to claim back their own.’ She is also inspired by specific buildings, as in Walking Meditation (2000) made in and for Cleeve Abbey, a thirteenth century Cistercian ruin in Somerset. A third concern is with the way the simplification of an image can disturb perception. This is achieved in the video series Wild West (2005), made in collaboration with Rory Hamilton, in which a group of cowboys on horses riding across a plain is reduced to a shimmering volatile bock of colour from which all other information has been removed.
'Alwyn Park House' (2011), is modeled on the form of the toy theatre, with its stack of printed cardboard flats that recede from the eye and between which figures can emerge and disappear. The house is a composite, constructed from stock photos of furniture and household effects found in stately home guides. Thus the objects represented in the film exist, but not in the configuration in which we see them here. The walls have been removed so that the remaining furniture comes to define the space it occupies as provisional. Doors have been made semi-transparent (and given thickened edges, since they are only paper-thin) in order to create a complex vista of succeeding spaces through which a virtual camera can fly.
For Best the work ‘refers to the interior spaces of computer games and their first person point of view’, and although the piece is structured loosely round alternating views of corridors and object groupings, the whole is constructed as a continuous fly-through. The camera finds a path between all these contrasting elements, unifying everything it encounters into a sequence of surfaces to be negotiated. But this unifying process also generates the many anomalies of scale and texture that reveal the nature of the work’s construction. Here, perhaps, one might think of the way the inexperienced gamer finds himself bumping against the pixilated boundary wall of the game’s universe. But although gaming environments are often hostile and dangerous, they are never uncanny, as they are in Betty’s house, which the humans have abandoned, leaving an eerily empty scene reminiscent of that described in the story of the Mary Celeste. Text by Nicky Hamlyn.
