"Hidden Compartment" by Saida C

 

Saida Cherradi (b. 2007)

Hidden Compartment, (2024)

Leather Diagram

The aspect of the literary work of the story “The Human Chair” that had inspired me to make my piece is about a chair with a human inside. The reason why it inspired me is because the way the story was starting off is as though the person in the chair was speaking of past experiences of his obsessions through a letter. In the letter the  obsessions had soon developed with more twisted thought. And the way the writer had constructed the story makes the audience forget the relevance of the man’s experience in the chair. This caused a creative opening for a big twist, of the man being in the house of the person reading the letter. The meaning of my artwork in comparison to the literary source is the representation of the chair the man lived in. There’s food crumbs and bags showing that he had stayed for so long, as he was able to stay for months in the literary source. 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 bases. And for the arm parts of the chair, I had filled the leather with memory foam and sewed it, 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.