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Congratulations from Daisy Teage on Vimeo.

Degree show 2010

Humour and play are recurring themes in my work and I believe this makes for a more rewarding experience for the viewer, participants and the artist. I am interested in how fun and pleasure feature in our lives in a theoretical sense.

These themes arose from a fascination with human behaviour in particular the way we react when we are put into certain unusual situations. An example of this can be seen in Artists Muse Wanted where I advertised for volunteers to meet with me in the studio in order to inspire me. This led to bizarre meetings with total strangers whom I photographed, chatted with and interviewed, often under surveillance from up to four video cameras. On watching back the footage I became fascinated by our body language and identified an almost continuous stream of nervous laughter coming from both parties. We used it as a mechanism to cope with our circumstances and also to connect with one another – an instinctive response that is constantly mirrored in everyday life.

Laughter has a liberating element and is often seen as synonymous with hope. I see a connection with this and the transformations we go through when we become absorbed in an activity. Whilst engaged in an activity stresses and strains of daily life can temporarily fade depending on your level of engagement. Another of my past works Ludo (a giant board game that was played in public spaces around Oxford) could at first be daunting and even embarrassing to play in public however the participants reported a calming effect as they began to forget who was watching as the game went on. I believe that the more physically engaged you are with an activity the stronger this reaction. This can be seen in the work of Carsten Holler (most well known for the slides he installed in the Tate’s Turbine Hall - Test Site 2006). By putting slides into the context of the museum we are asked to consider how the feeling of giddy excitement we feel whilst on our descent could feed into our daily lives and perhaps make us happier.

My current work is an extension of these ideas using trampolines as a basis for my enquiry. Not dissimilar to the giddy feeling experienced after having travelled down a slide we lose ourselves a little and revert to a Dionysian or childlike vigour whilst jumping. This is illustrated in a series of stills taken from my film of three adults bouncing on a trampoline. The expression captured is more genuine than could ever be staged in a photograph and the sound track reveals a cacophony of excited squeals and giggles one would hardly recognise as your own. These are precious moments where we are free from any rational concerns as endorphins take over and we revert to a comic hysteria, surrendering entirely to the experience. It is these inherent responses that we all share, the ones which we are so often unaware of, that I feel connects us as a species.