The Lost Toy Room. An Introduction

 

 - Loki Waits - 

Childhood ends but they remained and the life and love poured into them

The stories wrapped around them endured, adn in the shadows they moved.

Within the house there are many rooms and the empty corridors that snake between them do not end. 

Time has been here too long and gathers in strange drifts and tides.

Not all the doors are seen and and in some even Time itself will not go, buut nothing else may be written of those rooms lest they find out.

There are rooms filled with forgotten shrouded things, from dusty keys to memories and moments that will never come again.

Behind some shadowed doors slumber queer collections gathered by blind obsessions and bright fevered eyes, of birds and beasts that never where or never should have been. Caught behind glass walls and dusty domes, to stare out with taxidermists eyes or covered with heavy cloth to keep them still as if in restless morphine sleep.

In one room it is said stand a sea of flickering jars, each one filled with shards of broken hearts, while in another there is but a howling emptiness and taste of ash, lifetimes of regret poured in and sealed.

Behind each dark wooden wall, a moment or the price of a lifetime is caught like an ancient insect in amber.

The house and corridors that move within these moments , gather and bind to it all the lost and lonely places. A web of ways behind the world, drawing them close againsts the dark.

Amongst this myriad of moments and memories , the labyrinth of this strange sanctuary, hides the Toy Room.

Once the Toy Room had belonged to another house  and another time. Once it had belonged to another story and the designs of the Thorn Family. But time had passed and the children had grown up and put aside childish things. They no longer cared for the feelings of those they had left behind and broke the promises they had whispered to their toys in smaller voices as they huddled against the night

Now te Toy Room resonates with a new story, and those who stand within it feel as they were never meant to feel and move as they were never meant to feel...

The Lost Toy Room begain as a series of portraits based on the vision of an abandoned victorian play room and the toys within it brought to life. As the project  developed a wider story started to emerge, as questions and built upon each other: how would the Toys react to their new life and to the impact of the old, to exist with the fragments of a former life and their abandonment?

The study of each character and its interactions with others became a history and in time I moved back beyond the door to the family and the children who had owned them.

Like an unmade jigsaw, the history of the Toy Room is revealed only in parts, shown in the aftermath and impact, clues in the images or brief lines beneath them. 

The Story glimpsed through their eyes and the games they have played.