Here We Left It, 2020-2023, is an ongoing series of short one minute videos exploring female subjectivity. Everyday objects, such as bin bags and discarded packaging, become video containers. The videos are brief, looped works where nothing much seems to happen. Silently flickering and barely moving, they depict fleeting moments of domestic escape and the upending of the real in daily life.
Scylla and Charybdis segment from the video Sea Battle. This work thinks about the femle experience in Greek myths.
Edge, 2018, from a series of short films about edges and margins.
Sinking, 2018 is a film about the sink as a portal. (clip)
Nothing Gets Through, 2017 is constructed using still images.The images are manipulated, cut up and superimposed over each other to create a “constellation” of memory images. The images of birth used in the video are taken from A Handbook for Midwives and Maternity Nurses, printed in 1909, which was given to me when I was pregnant with my first child. I have used these images to represent the entry of this particular female body into a patriarchal and medicalised discourse.The title of the work, Nothing gets Through, is taken from Helene Cixous’ Castration or Decapitation.
Nothing Gets Through was shortlisted for the Birth Rites Collection Competition 2017.
The video, (S)mother, 2017 is built around a found photograph of a mother and child. The photograph is ordinary: a mother and child sit outside their home. The photograph suggests domestic contentment but the picture shows only one moment and the representation of this particular mother is constrained and trapped within the boundaries of the photograph. In the video this photograph has been altered through repeated photocopying degrading the image and disrupting its meanings. Other images and drawings are superimposed onto the original photograph, causing further disruption, with a narrative that belies the restraint and ordinariness of the image. (S)mother is looped creating an endless cycle of images trapping the viewer and the mother in an endless stream of repetition referencing Kaja Silverman’s idea that, “subjectivity itself is, in its most profound sense, nothing other than a constellation of visual memories struggling to achieve perceptual form.” (Silverman 2000, 89)
One for Sorrow, 2015 is a collaborative project produced with the artist Jo Paul while we were AA2A resident artists at North Hertfordshire College in 2015.
The work investigates how a collaborative artistic practice can traverse the themes of infertility, maternal loss and maternal desire with a particular focus on the imaginary child.
Photograph of work in progress in the stutdio. Drawings and video. 2023