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General text
I am fascinated by change - the continuing change/decay of the subject that happens beyond us, yet within. Rituals mark these changes, the passage of time; daily rituals give rhythm, sense to our mundane existence, personal rituals allow us alternate way of being in an overtly regularised world. The societies try to control relationships; life-styles also approve of rituals.
How I see it: the inherent quality of any rituals- repeating moments, repeating actions, repeating gestures - allow me to create repeating moments in time that offer a view of timelessness. The repetitions leave room for play and chance to creep in - which are of undeniable importance to my works.
I do draw on traditional rituals of cooking, home keeping, making crafts associated with women. I use the language of fashion and make-up.
I have used the vocabulary of craft or cooking programs on TV aimed at women. The use of close ups of manicured hands encased in bangles kneading dough or snipping away with scissors to form a paper flower forms the bases of the single channel video 'Uglification'. Only here, the scissors snips away vigorously at a doll, leaving the feminine body of the doll dismembered.
But reading them only as feminine rituals, places everything in a simple construction robbing them of other readings.
One of my earliest single channel video Hand Caresses and Variations1 shot in abstract simplicity embodies all my concerns of temporal, physical, spiritual, sexual and racial. Where the repetitive gestures, actions, the process draws one to cycle of love, loss, pain and play. It started with the sentence in Alice in wonderland, where the Queen ask's the knaves to be beheaded - as they did not paint the roses red.
My engagement with rituals, which are repetitive, thus temporal, suggest unfolding: a process, not a plot. For example in Hand Caresses and Variations1 after first few frames the audience is aware that the white rose will be covered completely in red paint: that’s the plot, the story, if one is searching for narratives. Yet I have witnessed a room full of people not walking away from this real-time action, a 13 minute long piece as they have moved beyond the predictable (white rose smeared with red paint) and engaged into how the paint is applied, touched, caressed then smeared in the rose. It is not the rose it’s the process, the transformation within that transfixes.
Time, timelessness, found objects, the unnoticed life of the everyday, the un-regarded, the mundane, the discarded, are all themes of my work
I often come to my visual perceptions through language. Words are integral to what I do. I am intrigued by the century of ceaseless movement – of peoples, of information, of goods, of ideas, a flow that becomes a flood, where nothing, finally, seems to be in the right place, where nothing is held, where the positive energy of free markets and unrestricted access, of democracy, of travel, of opportunity, gives way to flux without purpose, agitation, instability… I am very much part of this flux, scuttling around the world receptive to the private and public sense of devastating loss.
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Text on the project "White Room"
Text on the project " The pleasing birth"
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