I do admire your courage. I think I'll eat your heart.

Red Dragon.

From a trilogy of films based on Hannibal Lecter, I was watching the second film, Red Dragon a while ago, and there is a specific shot and sub plot within the murder investigation scene by the police officer- it caught my attention, and actually influenced my work (but not in a weird twisted way, fyi).

The bit I mean is where Will Graham (police officer) is looking and noting the first crime scene in order to reveal particular idiosyncrasies of the killer, and it is where he finds the smashed mirrors in the house of the victims. The bits of mirror are then placed in the victims' eyes. It is this part that was important to me; a famous quote is that "eyes are the window to the soul" and from here I began thinking.

I was thinking about it (long winded, but stay with me) because eyes are a personal thing.. Most of us would be happy to donate our organs when we pass away, but plenty of people I know wouldn't donate their eyes. Why? "Because they're mine, I've seen my life through them.. they're my own". Therefore grew my initial ideas in the pathway stage of covering the [photos of me as a baby] eyes in my first photographs with words. It was a later accident that saw my idea of scratching photos of myself away, to remove the personality of the person. It started with the eyes but then moved into the whole body to create a removal of existence.

The latter idea was also partially taken from a moment in a scene from Red Dragon again; the scrapbook about Hannibal, belonging to The Tooth Fairy killer shows a scribbling out of a photograph with a pen, and it slightly screws the paper up. My work was simply the intentional act of this 'Freudian slip'.