Anderson uses her North African cultural background to create sculptures, architectures and films based on fictional childhood memories’.

When she was age three, her French-speaking Algerian mother and her English father separated, and she left England with the mother who forbade her from mentioning the country or her father again. This prompted Anderson’s penchant for storytelling and making paintings, sculptures and films that relate to her childhood memories.

She refers to her works as ‘architectures’ and they often reference the circular shape that she equates with anxiety and enclosure. In her films the narratives are also often circular while architectures have always been the starting points of her stories -the triggering point of recollection. She began as an artist doing performances and since then has been working with elements of the body that she relates to intimate architectural elements in her work.

Anderson considers time to be her most significant working material. Using the media of film, drawing and sculpture she plays with dislocation of time in the same way that children construct parallel worlds. Using and often combining the mediums of film and sculpture, she uses wax dolls and red dolls’ hair to reinvent her childhood through the re-imagining of her own memories and believes that “autobiography itself can often be purely fiction.”

In 2006, she had a wax model of herself fabricated for a project that marked the beginning of an ongoing cycle of works including the photographic series, Master Puppet, featuring Anderson and her alter ego. Her effigy is also the heroine of The Dolls’ Day (2008) and The Night I Became A Doll (2009) films, along with her sculptural group Towers.  Rapunzel -also known as The Isolated Child, was one of her Towers’ series built at a larger scale -as it was made of three thousand metres of red hair forming a gigantic installation.

In 2010 after making her Dolls’ Mask n.5 ,the series continue with the new vast site-specific installations like Synapses (2010) for her exhibition ‘Time Reversal’ at the Riflemaker Gallery, London. A similar work entitled Birth made of dolls’ hair will envelop an entire room at the Busan Biennial. Anderson will also include the small sculpture Crown from her sand tower series where a small red haired doll made in her own image is squatting beneath a canopy of black sand from Algiers.

- James PUTNAM