Lulu Boddey

GRADUATE COLLECTION

Exploring the tension between exposure and excess, drawing from decadent eras where indulgence and ornament become inseparable. Pushing the figure toward stillness, accumulation, and saturation, asking how far a person can become their possessions. Clothing becomes a residue of experience, an imprint that clings to the body even as it detaches from function. Space itself is complicit.

The air around objects carries absence, preservation both protects and corrodes meaning. Sentimentality becomes indulgent. Excess becomes a mode of dwelling. At the centre of the work is a reinterpretation of objects, particularly feminine objects and those that inform identity. Through acts of preservation, flattening, storing, and exaggerating, items are deprived of their original meaning and re contextualised. They take new shapes, becoming intimate reliquaries of selfhood rather than decorative remnants.

The project constructs characters who reclaim experiences historically feminised, emotion, pain, passivity, exposure, and renders them powerful and indulgent. Rather than asserting control, these characters invite spectators to experience beauty through vulnerability, to encounter transcendence through fragility and questioning. Surrealism becomes a method for unsettling the boundaries between person and object.

The work explores how the figure almost becomes their surroundings, how preservation and sentimentality blur the distinction between inner experience and external accumulation.

The balance of exposure and excess is heightened through references to decadent eras, pushing the boundaries of how far a person can merge with their items and how far objects can be reimagined through stillness, flattening, and exaggeration.

Colour choices, material decisions, and spatial arrangements all participate in this reimagining. Saturated in ornament, the preserved objects become sentimental, distorted relics. Through this process, I examine the strength of the connection between objects and inner experience, creating a narrative in which the person and their possessions are inseparable, mutually constitutive, and endlessly reinterpreted.