Havisham (2012) is a complex mixed-media piece, responding to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem of the same title. The poem projects the voice of Miss Havisham from Dickens’ Great Expectations, offering a perspective wrought with bitterness and despair: “Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then I haven’t wished him dead”. The ‘day since then’ is Havisham’s wedding, the ageing spinster now reflecting upon her tragic situation; the dress the embodiment of her loss and grief, rapidly decaying and disintegrating like her own body, her own heart. The wedding dress installation captures this melancholy, this loss. The piece is comprised of a vintage wedding dress as the main body, with layered ceramic, paper and dried roses morphing from a state of beautiful ivory purity – suggestive of innocence and hope – through to discoloured, and then finally blackened roses; black for Havisham’s soul tainted by hate; black representative of the final burning of Satis House.

The encroaching decomposition of Havisham and her dress is further visualised through the interwoven calico down one side of the dress, which eventually suffocates and strangles the delicate lace beneath. Trailing threads recreate the smothering cobwebs; porcelain, breaking hearts, stamped and impressed with the poem’s phrases are suspended amongst the roses. An embroidered version of Duffy’s poem hangs on the adjoining wall – the unravelling black and red threads leading from the dress, feeding directly into the poem’s tragic lines. Each porcelain rose and heart – all made by hand by the artist – is carefully sculpted, with colouration subtly building to the climatic, final black-red decay. The paper roses are created from the pages of Dickens’ Great Expectations, specifically those passages featuring Havisham.

The piece combines craft with conceptual reflection upon not only Dickens’ text, but also engaging with Duffy’s proto-feminist response to Dickens’ tragic character. Literature and art combine to produce a poignant material rendering of a woman scorned.