Paranoia Is A Killer

Possibly my only sculpture work from 2008 that I managed to see through to the end and also find reason as to why it stands in my studio as it does.
Recently, I have been dealing with the notion of personal feelings and emotions combined with war and also the question of what it must be like to be inside a soldiers head during conflict on such a ‘real’ scale



Post-war reports which contain interviews with soldiers suggest that mental health can deteriorate when people have been exposed to graphical and physical war and perhaps not mentally ready for the maelstrom they have just been thrown into. In this piece, I have tried to visually recreate the feeling of ultimate paranoia on a battlefield. Not the part where you hallucinate or think people are talking about you, but the point where you are convinced you are the enemy and you begin to argue with yourself.
In the diorama, try to imagine yourself as both characters used. They are not visually the same, as so to confuse the viewer, but the scene depicts a paranoia breakdown on the battlefield, where the soldier has attacked himself, and therefore committed suicide. Visually, it doesn’t look that horrific to start with – but the added meaning can be related to real life incidents of war, which instantly makes the piece look more controversial and tainted.



The models in the piece are models from Warhammer 40K, a war tabletop game, as primarily myself and Joe Hayward planned to work on a series of diorama’s created with Warhammer models, but the idea was scrapped as we felt the project wasn’t generic enough, because we ourselves had not created the models, and the war figurines were world-widely known and could be recognized swiftly.