"Hidden Compartment" by Saida C

 

Saida Cherradi (b. 2007)

Hidden Compartment, (2024)

Leather Diorama

The aspect of the literary work of the story “The Human Chair” by Edogawa Ranpo that had inspired me to make my piece was the man inside a chair. The reason as to why it inspired me was because of the way the story had transitioned from the person who had decided to hide in a chair in order to escape his insecurities. Into where he confessed this deep secret and crime through a letter to the woman he had grown obsessed with after hiding in her house for months. The author has constructed the story in a way that made the confession letter a shock to the audience. The relevance of the man’s experience in the chair seemed like a distant tale and irrelevant to the woman who was using the chair. The meaning of my artwork in comparison to the literary source is the representation of the chair that the man lived in. There’s trash around the chair in order to show the long period of time in which the man had lived in the chair. The materials used were leather, cardboard, memory foam, wrappers, paper, paint, masking tape, string, and a needle. The techniques I used were to create scaffolding with cardboard, and cover it with memory foam for the base. As for the arm parts of the chair, I had filled the leather with memory foam and sewed it shut, then attached it to the base. The message behind the artwork is to put out the ominous feeling as though someone had been there. Just as the looming presence of the man in the chair had in the story.