_{Another Side builds on my current practice of creating animated projected video by utilising hand-drawn rotoscoping over printed video stills to investigate impermanence in relation to being. For this particular work, I was interested in expanding my exploration of the transience of self via the notion of parallel worlds.}

_{I am fascinated with the idea of other realities existing simultaneously over or beneath our own. My doctoral studies focused on the psychoanalytic notion of the void of the Real as a here-but-not-here, absent presence in every tangible, Symbolic self, and how the threat inherent in this psychic dichotomy manifests in our conscious reality – flaring up in trauma; detectable underneath the surface of the gaze. It is the creeping sensation of our own nothingness, both terrifying and seductive, that hovers, mirage-like, like something we catch a glimpse of but can’t quite make out. For me, the idea of parallel worlds exist on a similar psychological frequency.}

_{Physicists have suggested that it is the sudden and unexplained appearance of previously invisible ‘dark matter’ in space, and the subsequent ability to measure, track and study its behaviour, that puts credence to the possibility of parallel worlds existing in tandem with the visible world (Powell, 2013). And that without the existence of the stabilising capacity of dark matter, astronomers have concluded that rotating galaxies such as our own would fly apart (Powell, 2013). Given the inexorable connection between dark matter and light, between the visible and the invisible, how, then, does the parallel world affect the ‘real’ world? Is one world more ‘real’ than the other? Can one world privilege or ‘cancel out’ the other if they need each other to exist at all? And what happens to our world when or if the parallel world becomes visible and tangible? What happens to us? In psychological terms, these ideas link to the relationship between the self and the void of its own nothingness. At once tangible and intangible, at once being and non-being, at once present and absent, each state arguably exists because of the other, in an uneasy alliance that is as ominous as it is constant.} 

_{I wonder how these other, parallel worlds look. I imagine them to be very similar to our visible reality, but tweaked, skewed, the negative to the positive, perhaps – a ‘shadow galaxy’ hovering over our own. In Another Side, I drew on the natural landscape – specifically, the ocean – to suggest this other reality. “Random cosmic violence tends to produce radiation of all different energies, equivalent to the roar of waves on the beach” (Powell, 2013, n.p.). In the big bang collision of dark matter and the possibility of the dark worlds it might subsequently generate, the ocean seems to be an apt subject in which to explore the parallel.}