Tick, Tock, the Game is Locked, Lancaster Lofts Open Studio Event, 2014

sugar and other media

At the time I created this piece, I was using gnomes as a visual metaphor for people with issues of difference, particularly those related to disability. I was also using sugar as a medium quite a lot. I was enchanted by sugar’s fragility, its sparkling, crystalline texture and its confectionary smell. It seemed well suited to the themes I was playing with of mortality, the fragility of life, and its transitory sweetness.

The title of this piece comes from a rhyme we used to say in Memphis, Tennessee when I was a child. When we had enough players for a game, we’d stand in a circle, link our pinky fingers together and swing our arms back and forth, chanting, “Tick, Tock, the game is locked and nobody else can play. And if they do, we’ll take our shoe, and beat them black and blue.”

Horrible, I know, and reflective of how, from an early age, humans do love to exclude.