Heather O'Rourke: If I try hard to really consider how often my character Carol Anne and I were walking that tightrope, and how many screens it was happening on, or in, its dizzying…. There might well have been a moment, a minute, a few seconds even when I was never there, or here, at all.

Emmanuel Lewis: I guess there is a parallel in my experience, I similarly came to see myself through a doubling or multiplication.. But in my case the effect was more a suspension of time than a continual replay. By inhabiting the role of Webster Long, I was able to repeat and extend my early childhood indefinitely. - Excerpt from script of Fiction Friction


Fiction Friction: The Big Bang and the Bonsai Tree is a rumination on New York based artists Ian Cooper and Anna Craycroft's shared attraction to the trappings of childhood. Cooper and Craycroft's allegory for this state were the careers of 1980's child actors Heather O'Rourke and Emmanuel Lewis.

Dressed up in proper role-play with Craycroft as Webster and Cooper as Carol Anne Cooper and Craycroft sit on a mock television set to discuss in character the parallels of their childhood experiences.

The artists chose O'Rourke and Lewis as subjects for their collaboration specifically because of the psychological and physical toll that their on-screen portrayals had on the actors, literally halting their growth.

Already developmentally stunted due to a physiological condition, Lewis' portrayal of the Webster character cast him in a role 5 years younger than he was, replaying the years he had just grown out of. O'Rourke died tragically of an intestinal rupture during the filming of the final Poltergeist film, abruptly ending her life at age 14, and forever cementing the entanglement of her own identity with that of her fictional character.

The cultural representation of childhood is a common theme in the artwork that Cooper and Craycroft make independently of one another, and for Fiction Friction they wanted to explore their shared seduction to repeat this period of their own lives.

O'Rourke starred in the "Poltergeist" series as Carol Anne Freeling, and Lewis was the star of the 1980's television sitcom "Webster".