Degree Show 2025
Ellie May
BA Art and Design
‘The Viewing Room’ explores surveillance, voyeurism and media consumption, inviting viewers to reflect on their roles as both watchers and the watched. Using familiar interfaces of TV, CDs and social media, it reframes everyday passive acts as ethically ambiguous, highlighting human desires, power dynamics and society’s normalisation of surveillance.
‘Seen@Norwood Road: Behind Closed Doors’ invites viewers to explore 5 television channels depicting ‘live’ CCTV style surveillance footage of unaware subjects in their private space, watching TV, making dinner, socialising, and relaxing in their bedrooms. The act of ‘people watching’ is reframed from a more sinister and omniscient surveillance perspective.
‘Overheard@Norwood Road: Eavesdrop FM’ invites viewers to listen to CDs through headphones, picking tracks with dramatised ‘click-bait’ titles to listen in to day-to-day life at Norwood Road.The viewer becomes a ‘fly on the wall’ choosing which room to ‘bug’, pushing the boundary of what could be seen as ‘innocent’ eavesdropping.
Accessing ‘Lives@Norwood Road: Unfiltered’ the viewer can scroll through an Instagram page and ‘stalk’ the online posts, stories, comments of Norwood Road’s residents, including more intimate information on their lives both inside and outside the home. The familiar act of scrolling replicates the casual ‘stalking’ of others on social media.