Mark Wallinger's practice has slowly moved from a socio-political conscience (seen in Oxymoron, his Irish flag coloured Union Jack) to a concern with the personal identity - of the way we relate to ourselves, our perceptions and our human spirituality, and it is this aspect I am most interested in. Wallinger infiltrates the public world around him, whether through business, commerce and ideals of value (his race horse named A Real Work of Art and accompanying miniature - an extension of Duchampian philosophy as another apparently non-art object is claimed as a work of art) or exploring the spiritual values of the modern commuter (his Bible-reading journey up a London escalator in Angel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f6SXh1KXPU). Wallinger's work exists within a mythical palette - exploring ideas of strangeness, otherness and the abject in a contemporary context. For example, Time and Relative Dimension in Space consists of a life size TARDIS (of Doctor Who fame), a modern relic that Wallinger has altered, covering the once familiar object with mirrors, and Ghost, which although could be taken for pseudo-medieval imagery of a unicorn is in actual fact a negative image of a 20th century photograph, a false horn attached to a horse. However, this sense of contemporary mysticism is but one facet to Wallinger's work - through his use of pop culture references, public space and symbolic imagery, there is a strong interest in identity - in what makes us individually and culturally human. Together with Angel; Hymn and Prometheus make up the Talking in Tongues trilogy, in which Wallinger's alter-ego 'Blind Faith' explores identity in terms of religious doctrine and spirituality. In Sleeper, however, Wallinger focuses on identity within a historical, geographical and cultural context. In an interview for the Tate (www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD05OVIRkNY), the artist expands on some of the symbolism behind his 9 day residency in a Berlin gallery, dressed as a bear - the name itself refers to espionage (a reference to Berlin's world war history), the bear itself is a symbol (and possible linguistic root of the name itself) of the city as well as having a link to the artist's memory of children's fantasy TV series The Singing Ringing Tree. So, the initially slapstick scene of a man in a bear costume walking, running and falling becomes a more complex assemblage of symbolic references and cultural perspectives. This is my intention as I continue to produce my own performance video work - to consider the use of costume, props and actions forming subtle associations within the context of personal identity, popular culture. Like Wallinger, I aim for my practice to exist in the space between the ordinary (relating to every day human experience) and the extraordinary (constructing events, scenes and images that surprise or intrigue). There are three further elements to Sleeper that I feel my practice is increasingly concerned with - restlessness (as a human and of the artist), travel/a journey (can often give structure and/or a narrative to the piece) and a sense of pointlessness (not in what the artist is saying but in the physicality of the piece itself - a journey that goes nowhere, and action that achieves nothing).