Lewis Chamberlain: From the Pocket of A Ghost - Hi-Fructose Magazine

""If I have to change my work halfway through, that causes huge issues. I like to know exactly what I'm doing and I like to plan ahead.""

""I think that with that drawing, I was quite deliberate about what I wanted. I wanted to draw a figure. I wanted to draw that doll actually," Chamberlain explains. He shares that his father, also an artist, goes to charity shops to source objects that Chamberlain might like to draw. Once, his father scored a Barbie doll on one of those excursions. Chamberlain removed the head and attached it to another doll's body. "I changed the hair and everything. So it's been butchered around a lot," he says. He thought of having the character fall from a balloon or a rocket before settling on an airplane. "Falling from an airplane is more relatable than falling from a balloon to most people, I think.""

""The sets that he builds aren't quite as elaborate as museum dioramas, he notes. "I deliberately don't do that. I don't make things well," he says. The slide's ladder in "Woman Falling from an Airplane" was made of balsa wood, while the slide itself is paper. In the foreground, you'll see a curve that could either be a river or a road- "it's just a winding line to lead the viewer into the drawing," Chamberlain says. That's also made of paper. The streetlamp in the foreground is "a piece of wire with something stuck on the end.""

Chamberlain constructs miniature scenes inside dark cardboard boxes and uses bright directional lights to stage different angles. He deliberately composes figures and selects found dolls, often altering them by swapping heads and changing hair. Materials remain intentionally modest: balsa wood ladders, paper slides and paper curves serve as roads or rivers, and a simple wire serves as a streetlamp. Chamberlain avoids creating exact replicas of real places, favoring ambiguous, transportive environments. He plans carefully and dislikes mid-process changes, preferring to know exactly what he will do. He chooses relatable motifs, such as making a figure fall from an airplane rather than a balloon.

Read at Hi-Fructose Magazine - The New Contemporary Art Magazine