No place and Good place (2020) form part of a series of event-based works relating to the traumatic experience of the loss of my entire home and personal belongings during the Great Fire of 7 June 2017. However, the work also reflects my ongoing interest in worldmaking discourses and the ideologies of place and space. Utopia, dystopia and heterotopia are nuances of a family of constructions around place, such as a good place; a bad place; non-place; cocooning; displacement; and migrancy. Perceptions and projections of a good place as utopia are common, but exist mainly as fictions. Although many utopias have been conceived over the ages, few have worked out. Still they persist in appearing in a social and political sense; in addition, most people nurture personal ideas about a ‘good’ place. A non-place is a no-man’s land or space that belongs to no-one and everyone, such as, according to French anthropologist Marc Augé, a supermarket, airport or mall. Although a non-place then seems void of utopia, it is not, since these spaces have been conceived as ‘good’ places with good objective or teleology. Utopian is an ambivalent concept; thus my two works on exhibition are presented as intertwined concepts and speak to the ambivalence of utopian space. 

Notions of a good place are explored through shattered and blurred island imagery, since the search for paradise in human mortal time remains a dream and a negotiated discourse. Yet the dream remains.