2025
2022-2024
SCULPTURE WORK
COLLECTED OBJECTS
SEEDS AND CITATIONS
DRAWINGS / NOTES
PHOTO WORK
THE SUNSHINE OF PARADISE ALLEY 2024
ABOUT
CONTACT
CV
SCENARIO is an installation of what was originally designed as a set by Delia Cadman for Mari Sitner’s play Nebraska, directed by Jeanette Delany. Nebraska is set in a generic midwestern duplex. A travelling salesman enters the family home welcomed in naively by a neurotic teenage brother and sister, though as we come to find out, he has arrived not so much to sell as to buy scrap parts – body parts – a finger, a liver, a heart. In a broken family desperate for cash and its symbolic freedoms, the drama unfolds.
The installation version of the set provides a more intimate window into the setting allowing the set’s details to take on a greater significance. As an installation the set becomes less picturesque and more immersive and sculptural. Hidden within what appears to be a normal and cozy abode, are small hints of the uncanny and disturbed – a glut of cleaning supplies, obsessively collected pig magnets, and plastic covered furniture, give the viewer the feeling of something being off, slightly unpleasant – a lurking darkness. Many of the objects incorporated were chosen for being sickly sweet, American and decayed, alluding to a fragmented facade of normalcy and consistency.
SCENARIO forefronts objects in order to tell a story, or to “set up” dramatic action. There is an anticipation, an undispersed energy to a set that implies action without there being any. It becomes a place frozen in time and takes on the quality of a period room in a museum. Without actors the objects and set pieces take on their own character, and correspond to one another independent of performative action to tell a new new story, related to but different from the play’s plot.
Delia works primarily as a sculptor. In their sculpture work they mobilize a theatrical sensibility informed by sets, props and peep shows in a way that is simultaneously severe and cheeky. This set was an exercise in delving deeper into theater as a medium, applying some of the themes and logic of their sculpture work to a different mode entirely.