Ten Thousand Demons

Ten Thousand Demons is about the fears of children when they don’t know the facts—when silence replaces explanation and imagination takes over. The fear grows, expands, and mutates when there are no answers. The unknown becomes something larger, more haunting than reality itself, and can linger long after childhood.

Protected from difficult truths about my father as a child, I found out about his suicide in fragments over many years. Initially, through the family's silence, then rumours, newspaper clippings, coroner's reports, and eventual conversations with family members and a few of his friends who stayed in touch.

There is a tension between seeking a connection with my father and a fear of what I might find. By manipulating and collaging stills from his Super 8 films where skulls, teeth, and eyes seem to emerge from the snow, I visualise the eerie, psychological weight of my father's struggles and a childhood shaped by absence, silence, and unanswered questions about his death.