"Sometimes it feels like the thread linking us to the world is so frail that at any time it could break leaving us at the mercy of our repressed confusion, loss and fear," writes photographer Charlotte Colbert. Her spine-tingling series, "A Day At Home," turns the trope of the haunted house into a surreal meditation on domesticity and self-destruction.
The images, following in the footsteps of female artists like Louise Bourgeois and Francesca Woodman, capture the moment where the familiarity of the house morphs into something strange and potentially dangerous. Delicate housewives resemble possessed spirits or broken dolls, turning the traditional comfort of the home into something altogether strange.
Like her artistic predecessors, Colbert questions the ramifications of a woman's life trapped inside the confines of her home, when order and propriety give way to something far darker. Dollhouses become geometric masks, limbs contort and collapse, and undetermined forms cast ghostly shadows. Aligning docility and insanity, the artworks reveal what happens when a woman begins keeping house and ends up with the house keeping her.
"When I see the pictures I feel like the woman is probably in her clean and comfortable living room. The decay around her existing solely in her head," Mila Askarova, founder and Director of Gazelli Art House, wrote of the project. Whether or not the twisted images exist solely in the woman's mind or not, the nightmarish visions sure look enchanting in print. See the series below and let us know if you think you're witnessing a demented fantasy or a warped reality.
See Francesca Woodman's photographs below to better understand the origin of the artistic haunted house.