Shop Window/Window Shop is a project Boggon started during the pandemic when galleries and museums were shut in a former shop in Folkestone’s Creative Quarter. In this revolving exhibition space, she presents a series of “witty, carefully crafted domestic scenes” Lewis Biggs curator of the Folkestone Triennale. The work shines a light on the strangeness of the times we are living through and juxtaposes the claustrophobia of enclosure in the domestic space with the powerful need to escape through fiction that has become an insistent subtext of contemporary society and intensified by the pandemic. The installation plays on the idea of “a two-way mirror, where fiction mimics reality and reality mimics fiction. “What appears to be a shop front is in fact a window into Boggon’s practice - her studio lies just behind the vitrine – and in these evolving installations, she explores our relationship with the high street and with the home. The project began with a used Ikea cardboard box from which Boggon made cut-outs of Tom and Jerry. Over several months, the work developed its own interactive narrative as Boggon added shadows mirrors and silvered household vessels which reflected the street and passers-by.”

 

Sophie Hastings arts writer.