The Old Judge and The Ruin
from Forensic Fables (2022)

Glass, iron, oxidative agent, glazed ceramics

Forensic Fables is a series of installations that looks at systems in which judgement becomes theatrical and where the courtroom offers one of its most visible stages. Wigs, robes and the careful choreography of legal speech enter the work as forms that promise authority and coherence. The project observes how these symbols operate and how they sometimes continue to circulate even after their meaning begins to shift.

The project attends to the ways authority is staged through gesture, costume and language. Judgement appears not only as a moral principle but also as a script repeated across institutions that organise worth discipline and punishment. The work lingers at the moment when seriousness reveals its own machinery and when the symbols of authority show their human construction.

The title echoes Forensic Fables-- the early twentieth century collection of legal anecdotes, where professional dignity occasionally meets unexpected absurdity. The project draws as well from the courtroom sketches of Monty Python, where the rituals of justice become fragile and where language continues to perform authority even as its meaning begins to loosen.