Exhibitions

My Own Little Worlds

Gregory Godhard’s artistic practice is an extension of his childhood love of amateur model-making, combined with his adulthood passion for film-making. His new exhibition, My Own Little Worlds is a collection of miniature dioramas: fictional geographies of his own imagining, in which witty and whimsical narratives emerge, and hence unravel.

The diorama is a unique creative model in that it is capable of concurrently bridging and inhabiting the space between various physical and immaterial binary oppositions: namely art and craft, and fictional narrative versus recounted event. Godhard’s background in animation and film is made self-evident, as he playfully remixes these examples into carefully considered and subtly deranged mis-en-scenes.

He refers to his father’s architectural practice as an early creative influence, concerned as all design is with measured and precise representations of proposed plans and ideas. But unlike his architect-father (who necessarily utilised industry-standard modeling materials), Godhard has not-yet eschewed the kinder-ergonomic, material principles of his youth. Choosing instead to embrace the lo-fi aesthetic of “child’s craft”, he melds this with a now-mature sensibility for material, form and composition in snapshot-animations of imagined action, drama, horror and comedy.

The miniaturisation that occurs during the process of ‘diorama-fication’ has the dual-effect of distancing and drawing the audience. We delight in the distortion of scale and are drawn into the works as a result – yet we are distanced by our designated role as voyeur upon a series of staged proceedings. This is partly offset by his informal choice of materials: seashells, driftwood and sand conjure a space of leisure, rather than one of interrupted intimacy.

In re-contextualising the faux-aestheticism of kitsch paraphernalia and do-it-yourself model -making, the parallel realities of My Own Little Worlds materialise as self-enclosed domains, where stasis – both physical and narrative – is imposed by invisible, outside forces.
In allowing us access to these eclectically assembled objects, Godhard highlights his various roles as artist/director/animator/set-designer, and invites us to engage with and embark upon an investigation of his creative development thus far.