“Write yourself,
Your body must be heard”
Helene Cixous
‘Escrito’ is a photographic poem which plays with the notion that a photograph can be ‘a becoming’,
a moving in time.
The body writes itself like a language, to itself and to another.
Made in Spain working with Graciela Iturbide and Al Liquindoi.
Three short video pieces made in Southern Italy with the musician Antonio Infantino and his group Tarantolati.
The tarantella dance originates from a historical tradition of a woman who after being bitten by a spider begins to dance out the venom through a trance like dance.
Performed in and filmed by the artist.
Invisible thread
Querencia…..a love of that specific kind which draws us back to that place from which we have come’
Kathleen Raine
Querencia was made travelling to where my maternal family lived for three generations in Argentina and Uruguay. ‘La Querencia’ was the farm where they lived and worked in the1940s. I found a place empty of people which although I had never visited, felt familiar.
The photographs follow an internal thread in the new yet remembered landscape: a certain kind of ‘looking’, for that which is part of us but invisible.
Inspired by neo realistic Italian cinema from the 1960s, the CineItalia series explores the way the camera was used to show the interior emotional world of women.
A woman moves through the streets of Rome with no specific direction into the ancient pinewood forests of the Maremma apparently lost or searching for something.
In ‘La Pineta’ she takes the arched position used by Tarantella women, reminiscent of birthing.
In Sabine Women- seven women gather near the Sabine mountains near Rome where historically women were said to have been violated by Roman men.
Through all the fragments, the women can attempt to free themselves from their roles within the photographic frame through the use of their own body.
Made in Cumbria on the borders of Scotland and England, the female figure moves between the interior world and the outside landscape.
The work is read like a dreamlike narrative with colour symbolism used for different internal states. The act of taking the photograph is improvised within a strict visual framework and the body then ‘makes’ the photograph through it’s own storytelling.
The Clay series was made amidst ancient clay cliffs in Greece. The photographs are fragile performances. Photographic moments made in silent places where few walk to.
In the stillness, the strange unity of the layers of clay and the living body reveal itself.
The body can be seen in the context of iconography, part of the process of earth and time. The layers of the clay lie next to the layers in the body, they are one and the same, closer than we think.
Myth appears in the use of colour, invoking a wild feminine and a Venusian element which the Italian poet Foscolo wrote about in this place.
Clay asks us to look at how close we are to the earth, how its changes are linked to our own.
Mother and daughter
Western edge,
Sage and chaparral
The mix of mercury and gold
Underneath this land of Chumash
There was gold,
Rush, quick silver
Now turning,
cleansings, extractions
A mulching of this dry land.
She stands, looking….
For new territory
The next steps,
There are others who stand close,
On this land lined by ocean, she walks,
Grounded
Open to new possibility
A slow gold
Santa Monica Tree
Santa Ana
Holy Wood
Santa Ana wind, yes she comes
through giant fig, shaping them
this
Long
Desert
Wind.
The trees pick her up
past cars, faces washed out with cool air
Leaves and cells dancing this neon city
Invisible
Above the manicured.
Pulse.
Heated tarmac,
she stands
barefoot,
not of the screen
another
surface
Holy
And of the wild
Untameable
Los Angeles
cars move through her
invisible metronome
pace of the heart
you’re calling..
Above
Santa Ana
Santa Monica
She
Using the artist’s body in site-specific areas in London the photographic performances are made in places which held an emotional story.
The performance becomes a photographic pilgrimage with a set of polaroids developed in each place which refer to throwaway tests used in cinema. Each image becomes both photographic evidence and a cinematic ‘moving’ image implying that memory can be fluid and is open to change.
Performance text 2007
I hunt for spaces, underpasses where I can stage photographs for my current project. I am both in the present, seeing a woman talking on her mobile, yet imagining a staged work. Suited men pass, chatting. I’m both here and somewhere else, I snap ideas, like a tourist.
I go to places I think I know.
A cobbled dead end in Shoreditch, another of those cold, steely late afternoons. A type of light I never get in dreams. This is visceral and present. A photograph can capture this grey, the film loves its flatness. In a striped jumper he forms cigarette smoke around who I am, was. I hear you’re taking ‘pictures’ ?
I work through areas of impasse. To relook, re-enact and hopefully find a way of passing through.
Yellow light on the city at night. A fox looks around the foot of St. Paul’s cathedral. He stares into the camera.
A flash of how the painter died, fell.
Was it in this light? I crush the thoughts out again but my camera wants to search it, make it, pass through it.
To return and look at an empty place.
Burnt.
In a dream.
Years now.
And now?
I go to places I’ve avoided.
Click and there …it is
The smallest movement on a Polaroid.
Made in the sun.
I look again and see something new in one of the prints, a piece of blue falling?
A trapped particle of light,
Icarus
or….
Simply light.
Re-looking at a photograph.
Really looking.
Then a washed out image.
OVEREXPOSED.
Burnt out, like a life thrown out.
Photographs of place as mementos.
Spaces of nothing.
Pause.
I let them develop on the dashboard until the whole surface is filled with small rectangles.
A series of moments.
Alchemical turning
Light
The Sun burns on
I move on to another place with a dashboard as darkroom.
Krishnamurti Oak Tree (Part of the KFA private collection, California)
Rooted Presence is a project made in 2014 which explores the work of the writer and spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti using the trees that surrounded him.
Made at his centres in Brockwood, England and Ojai, California these two environments were home to much of his thinking and writing and the trees are now like historical echoes of an actual presence: some of them which he walked past daily, others like the now sawn Californian oak under which he wrote many of his texts or the renowned Pepper tree where he had a transformational experience and broke free from all authority and organisations, asking everyone to become their own teacher.
Krishnamurti often spoke about a new way of seeing or observing, which was free from conditioning, and the series explores how the photograph can help us do this. He asked people to look to nature with close attention. With real attention one cannot only “see the extraordinary beauty of a tree” but also by truly observing, can experience a totality.
With this kind of focus the trees in this series reveal the idea of his teachings being like roots, yet growing in some mysterious way. They stand for a way for us to connect and yet allow for new transformation. His friend Vanda Scaravelli spoke of being ‘rooted’ yet “free” through her teachings with the body, expressing “allegrezza”, or an intelligent heart.
Over-exposing the film in some of the images reveals how we see and experience form. The light floods the film like our senses can when we experience being connected. The faint traces of the trees leave ghostly forms that are beckoning us forward to protect nature, to look and listen in new ways so it does not disappear from our consciousness, to listen again to what Krishnamurti calls ‘the silent sound of roots’. When something is almost imperceptible to the eye, it is allowing a space where we can experience a feeling without the form.Light, retina, branch, leaf — all revealing a rooted presence, a place which is fully alive.
The series was exhibited in 2015 at the Krishnamurti Foundation of America in California and is part of their private collection.
Listening. Forest
The forest represents going inward and the unknown in mythology, a place where a transition is marked. It is where the unconscious reveals its workings and ultimately is a space that allows for transformation.
This series looks into the initiations and transitions women go through in the context of the forest. It plays with the concept of a woman being in the woods and all the implications that follow when she leaves the confines of her group and begins to explore her own psyche.
I sit surrounded. Trees with limbed branches. Watching.
Forest as backdrop
Forest as audience
A performing oneself
A performing one
A performing
A
I return again and again to this place, its silent movement in time…
Roam, track, appear. Disappear, leave no clue, the unconscious.
As if working in a dream.
