Delia Cadman

The work I do may best be described as playful or theatrical. For a long time I have been interested in the theater as a place of reproduction, a tangible dream world in which value, best exemplified prop money, is severely warped, and objects and people are not themselves but what they represent. Theater, even at its most serious, is always play pretend. 

The play-pretend which arises out of the mad (or youthful) relation of actors and objects in the theater, allows me, in my work, to produce what I see as a kind of a mythologized reenactment of the day to day. By recreating the daily in the form of props, backdrops, and costumes I am able to displace what are usually considered empty/banal activities (such as exchanging money) with a purpose and care that misfires, resulting in the awkward humor and discomfort that defines my work.  

I am interested in themes of weight, value, preservation, maintenance, visability, audience and consciousness. These themes interest me as the hidden poetics that underpin our every-day exchanges. They are what is real and human in economy. In relation to an increasingly digital and artificial world in which exchanges are closely monitored and defined by their monetary potential, my work is analog and defunct. As such, it is also a proposition for a new mode of being, and new forms of relation which are more secluded and numberless.