My work explores historical propaganda and the role of decoration in the construction of political and cultural identity. Strategies of appropriation are at the core of my practice, and archival research is a large part of my  process. I am interested in the intersection of contemporary global reality with an often idealized collective past. I aim to slow down a capitalist sense  of time by making art ‘products’ with a shelf life, such as the expendable consumer hand-held fan commercially produced today.  This project explores the Messel-Rosse collection of antique fans at the  Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge, UK. It is inspired by several fan forms from the collection that serve as templates for new iterations that merge ornament with contemporary landscape scenes from around Sussex. Following the  example of fans which appear to be  windows into other worlds, I bring  ‘other worlds’ into the Nymans gardens, with the eye of a tourist looking for the not-so-picturesque. Grand Tour Fan  appropriates from the original eighteenth century Grand Tour Fan on display in Cambridge. This fan inserts intentionally  banal public places from contemporary  Sussex life into the historical framework – substituting scenes of Italian ruins with those of Gatwick Airport (just a few  miles from Nymans House).

Made of expanded PVC material and hand-painted, the fans are like out-of- scale theatrical props. Their placement in the Nymans setting provides a rich contrast to the work of the National Trust, in protecting and preserving  historic heritage. Representations of Gatwick Airport (historically a manor  and dairy farm), or the M23 roadway (the basis for the Road to Nymans fan), are elevated into absurd revisions of the ornamental fan scenes, challenging site-specific concepts of fantasy and utopia.