Caster

Caster is a photographic series made in the artist's London home — a space that, upon moving in, appeared inhabited not by former occupants in their physical form, but by their lingering presences, their ghosts. The work centres on the carpet as a metaphor for indexical presence: the presence of absence. As a surface repeatedly walked on, sat on, and lived upon, the carpet absorbs human history into its fibres, retaining the traces of lives once lived. In Caster, this everyday domestic object becomes animated, transformed into biomorphic, cocoon-like forms that coil, implode, or erupt, as if caught between materiality and apparition.

In this recent series, Klenz offers a sustained meditation on the psychological condition of the uncanny. Freud’s concept of the unheimlich — derived from heimlich, meaning both homely and concealed — describes the moment when the familiar turns strange, when what is meant to remain hidden reveals itself from within the everyday. In Caster, this sensation emerges through the carpet as an absence in being: a mute witness that speaks through form rather than figure.

In Klenz’ images the domestic interior becomes both the source and the stage of haunting. Home, traditionally understood as a site of comfort and shelter, is reconfigured in Klenz’ work as a space where uncanniness takes hold. The folded carpets that occupy the images recall the archetypal caricature of the ghost — the floating, draped sheet. This is heightened by the manner in which the shadows in the recesses and folds of the carpet’s fabric are inverted into glowing whiteness, suggesting the translucency so common to images of phantoms.The dark, subdued palette further references the visual language of nineteenth-century spirit photography, with its atmosphere of gloom and spectral uncertainty. Through these images, Caster reveals how the ordinary interior holds what everyday life conceals: the persistence of memory, the residue of inhabitation and a strange reminder of our own paradoxical ghostliness.