Romi Thornton
Featured: June 26th, 2025
I have involved performers as a form of material within my installations. Using live actors is a fascinating way to encourage the audience to interact with the work. I find that it takes the audience away from being an 'audience' and places them in the context of the piece.
'The PygmalionPro Xpo', 2023 explores facades, online dating and customer service interaction. The installation of 3D rendered animation and video simulates a trade show booth which navigates the false promises made and facades maintained by corporations. Due to the performative nature of the work - involving live actors and personas - the installation explores the expanded role of the exhibition visitor as a quasi-consumer. I found that the audience for the PygmalionPro Xpo often find themselves role playing with the actor and some reflected the feelings we have whilst talking to customer service agents: frustration, confusion and feeling manipulated.
The set embodies the ergonomically alluring, yet illusory promises tech companies offer us. And the carefully curated characters aim to blur the viewer’s distinction of reality whilst testing the conventions of our daily social interactions. The space suggests order and control, but, in leaving easter eggs for the viewer within the curations, and by recreating the peculiar and slightly-off moments we have with customer service, illusions are revealed and pretences are broken.
✳ Do you ever find yourself pushing the boundaries of a material—what’s the most surprising way you’ve used a material?
In the audio-visual installation 'Causal Nexus: A Confession About My Self-Fulfilling Insomnia', 2024 centres on a confessional prayer stool which sets the scene of nostalgic, cyber-spatial devotion. I sourced the prayer stool from an antique church furnishing shop which was one of the more fun pieces I've had to pick up. The warehouse was filled with church pews and benches, crosses and crucifixes, and an attic room filled with Vintage Blessed Virgin Mary statues. Once I picked up the material, I upholstered the knee cushion with a fabric printed with a repeated pattern made up of images of lo-poly raw meat from the online game Runescape. This set the scene for the online world the user is living within; a nostalgia-ridden childhood bedroom where the user has become lost and encrypted themselves. The prayer stool acted as an invitation for the audience to kneel down and encrypt themselves within the narrator's confessional. The nostalgic references not only act as a reference to my childhood - through the low poly graphics of online games and its references to religion - but they are also a testament to the online spaces such as Reddit and instagram, where ‘nostalgia core’ is a prominent theme, often acting as a familiar retreat that we - as the consumers - return to for comfort.
✴ What’s a new material you're currently experimenting with? Share your insights.
At the moment I am experimenting with fabric and how I can incorporate it into my installations to explore themes of 'honne' (one's true self) and 'tatemae' (one's persona) and their relationship with online culture. I am currently creating a piece with heat transferred images of motifs from games. The piece will be an ode to the forgotten world of 'Machinimas' which were films created by gamers using footage from games such as Sims or Runescape. The piece explores how games, the online world, and role playing environments can become a portal for tailoring our avatars and confessing our sins.
