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Court Fool
All Bad Score Emulations
Table Manners: Notes On Distance & Return
Tests (Various)
[01]
[02]
[03]
[04]
Court Fool
All Bad Score Emulations
Table Manners: Notes On Distance & Return
Tests (Various)
Creative Direction, Photography: Samuel R. Davis
Stylist: Hannah Rowell
HMU: Tayla Alexander
Photo Assistant: Harry Burmiester
Talent: Isla Coughlan
Agency: Five Twenty
Court Fool is a fashion story that explores the shifting roles we inhabit in daily life through the language of performance. Set within a stylised, theatrical world, the series examines the paradox of self-presentation. Are we expressing who we truly are, or merely performing the roles we’ve internalised? Court Fool questions whether any essential truth can be uncovered in our expressions of self—or whether all expression is, inevitably, a kind of mas
Direction, Photography: Samuel R. Davis
Stylist: Charlotte Heloise
Stylist Assistant: Mary-Jane Scanlon
Talent: Rosie Nash
Agency: Alt-Cast
Publication: Nose Magazine Issue 2
Art Direction, Photography: Samuel R. Davis
There’s an old science museum in Spotswood, fittingly titled Scienceworks. It’s one of those uncanny places that sort of just ambiently exists, both in its physical nature, as it’s located in one of the outer industrial parts of the city, and psychologically, as many people around my age have distinct memories and experiences from day trips or school excursions but haven’t actively thought of the place since childhood. This was the case for me too, in that I estimate it’s been some sixteen years since I’d last been there. Passing it by chance, my partner and I thought it’d be a nice way to spend the afternoon. I didn’t anticipate, however, how disorienting an experience it was going to be. Upon entering, I was immediately struck by how frighteningly little had changed. It felt like the almost precise preservation of some conglomerate of memories deep in my subconscious: here, now, vivid as ever.
I find that we conceptualise museums as facilities of preservation. However, this preservation tends to be associated with the objects behind the displays rather than the facility itself. In regular life, the objects and environments we interact with change in tandem with our bodies. When I return to a place after an extended hiatus, both the environment and my body have been weathered, amended, and aged by time. What was disorienting in this instance was that this museum seemed to exist as an almost perfect time capsule, separate from the temporal nature of the rest of the world.
Once we left the museum, I wasn’t so much elated as melancholic. There was a sort of dissonance between my body and my sense of self. I had, up to that point, felt like a singular, unified entity. However, on engaging with the interactive exhibits, I felt forced to re-experience the world through the eyes of a very distant self, one that was no longer around. In that sense, there seems to be a de-unifying nature to the way that time and memory function, whereby older selves are compartmentalised as ‘others’. When I think back to my nine-year-old self now, it doesn’t so much feel like ‘me’ as it does an ‘other’. Despite the fact that I experience my life distinctly in the singular first person, memories seem to function more abstractly. It is almost like being a third-party observer when recalling events. The further the distance, the stronger the effect.
Table Manners was a play on this phenomenon, whereby plastic or ‘fake’ food was, to me, emblematic of this perceptual framework. Like a memory, they’re inherently ‘other’, understood as artificial preservations of something organic and all too perishable. Our dealings with these stand-ins are familiar, uncanny, distant, and finally illusory. Form is preserved; touch, taste and smell are absent, supplied only by prior association.
If time is distance, memory is a return.