"There was so much darkness of course and as I think about the walk I believe that my conciliation with the darkness was probably a main feature of the expedition. This might be true but I’m not sure I should discuss it in the 200-word account; I’m not sure on what plane of experience that negotiation took place. On a pragmatic level the dark certainly had the upper hand, for example, I wasn’t able to discern dips in the road so my body jolted in surprise a number of times. But the darkness also did other things that dislocated me in ways that are more difficult to categories. From the beginning its amorphousness made me feel very young. Then it made the little wooden house appear vulnerable and enchanted, and so it occasioned the timorous wonder and yearning I felt as my friend and myself stood looking at that house. During those times when my friend and I were both looking at the same thing, or were talking about something near us, the darkness swerved and dissipated like a flock of starlings. And then, when we walked silently onwards, it became dense and granular again. This resurgence, however, was less puissant each time it occurred so that the last time it happened, after we had talked about the tied pony, the darkness heaved forward and then fell back. The space between it and I was quite perfect then, and as we rounded the bend and walked the last few hundred yards to my friend’s mother’s house I began to feel distinct and intact. I was grateful to feel this way but was careful to acknowledge my gratitude in an insouciant fashion since I know well how gratitude can shake things.
We were sat at a wooden table and there was a fire next to us, the dogs were their, and some children too, moving about, setting off illuminated rockets. By this time the dark wasn’t at all unstructured and vaporous, it vaulted over us and glittered, regal and expansive. The darkness, I suppose, had become sky. Since recognizing this distinction it seems that when I write my 200-word account of a walk I took one night last summer I would do well to focus on the sky only. Darkness is an inextricable part of the sky I saw, but it will be enough to speak of the sky only and for the darkness to remain unremarked, alongside the news I received but will certainly make no mention of”.
"I’ll probably begin my account by saying something about how it was very dark and I felt very young. It was the kind of amorphous dark you wander about in when you’re a child, the kind of amorphous dark that eyeballs you hungrily when you wake up in the night. After that I might say something about the dog although I’m not entirely sure there was a dog with us. I know there were dogs at the end, one of them may have been a Dalmatian, and I think another had stomach ache. Perhaps the dog I think we had with us was with us for some of the way and then it either returned home or went on ahead of us to join the dogs that would be there at the end. I will also talk about a little wooden house with lots of windows that were in one of the fields we walked by. We stopped by the gate for a while and looked at the house. We might have leaned on the gate and we may have rested a foot on one of its rails, I don’t remember. The house looked a bit vulnerable but also very comforting, nurturing even. This combination of fragility and beneficence was very enchanting and I looked at the house with the kind of wonder I also associate with being very young. I am still able to recall the house, or at least I think I am able to. I might also mention the tree where the road forks. Earlier in the day when I was returning from my long solitary walk I saw a pony tied to this tree by a short length of rope. This seemed very unkind to me and when I noticed that around the tree was a perfectly circular track of bare, packed earth I felt uncomfortable. When myself and my friend reached the tree on our walk later on that evening the pony was no longer there, but the track was, and looking at it made me feel even more uncomfortable than when the pony had been there, earlier in the day. I might mention this and how I asked my friend about it and so I’ll also relay what she told me, the explanation she gave for this apparent cruelty, which I don’t fully remember but it had something to do with worming and appeased my concern and discomfort. After this exchange concluded the darkness returned, but this time it was more spread out and almost nuanced in places.
"I walk towards my ex-partners port-cabin tiptoeing into the field as if some sort of ghost, wondering if I should be there. There is a wooden structure and caravan, which has been deserted by his previous partner. I choose to go here to echo one of the questions that I have set, it is a place where I feel uncomfortable. This experience in the overlapping of my personal and relationship history is somewhere I would really rather not be. The atmosphere is heavy; I sit on the bed with the video camera and speak about how uncomfortable this makes me. I consider as I go around these dilapidated structures why I am choosing to revisit them for my research? I continue my walk onwards to an old green caravan, which I used to live in when I was in my early twenties; I photograph the structures and recall some of the memories. Part of me feels profoundly uninterested in pulling up memories and stories from my personal past, a sort of apathy and disinterest overtakes me, it’s not until I make the move to gathering stories of others that the work becomes interesting to me."
Visualizing Utopia? experiential experiments on the representation of a place.
Practice based research – National College of Art and Design, Dublin
This research focusses on very slow, very close experiential experiments into the representations of place. This place being a 'utopian' community in the West of Ireland which was established in the 1970's.
This practice based research involves three case studies. In this exposition I will mainly focus on the video works. Moving Stills.
One:
The first case study is a walking/oral practice in which I invite members of the community to explore the geographical space and speak about their personal experience of it. Asking individuals to walk with the camera and describe the place they feel most comfortable or uncomfortable, using a portable sound and video recorder, these ‘Auto walks’ have included a range of experiences from a varied group of individuals and explore collective memory and space through introspective and intimate testimony.
Two:
In my second case study I have been working with a HD camera creating what I have titled ‘Moving stills’ these pieces, are extremely close five-minute film pieces, which focus on the individual and my own relationship to them while sitting opposite them in silence. I have slowed the footage right down to drop into a fictive space.. Filmmakers such as James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, and Gillian Wearing amongst others have influenced the non-narrative and long shooting film methods.
Three:
In the third case study my own personal encounters with the space have been through swimming, breathing and night walking with the portable film and sound recorder and do not involve oral dialogue but are specifically sensory experiences. Influenced by the phenomenological texts of Merleau Ponty who speaks about the act of touching and being touched and how they interrelate. He states that ‘our embodied subjectivity is never located purely in either our tangibility or in our touching, but the intertwining of these two aspects, or where the two lines of a chiasm intersect with one another’ ( M. Ponty, 1958)
Using the medium of film and photography, this work seeks to explore the auto-ethnographic difficulties and philosophical challenges posed by representing a community in which I came to live as a child. Some of the questions being how not to be voyeuristic, how to form an approach to the ethics of representation, how to temper nostalgia and romanticism, avoiding a straight documentary approach to form a more ambiguous fine art practice.
A challenging dimension to the project being that I find myself inquiring into a very personal space and carrying out experiential experiments with subjects I am both related to and involved with. I struggle with definitions ,descriptions and distances. I find even as I try to document people and place the essential nature of representation causes any sealed statement to slip from reach. The question of “distance” has arisen as a continuously, my own personal distance from the location geographically, my emotional distance from the subjects and at what distance to locate myself as a filmmaker/photographer, as well as the ambiguous distance between this 'utopian' site and the ‘real’ world. Olivia Joret (artist) wrote in response to viewing the visual research : “I am interested in the distance, and at the same time closeness, of course ; this idea of the landscape being like a canvas (or tissue, fabric, skin) where stories (like a face) are projected, in retrospect. That idea. Something "strangely familiar" about the faces ; about Ireland too, like a place I remember rom somewhere else... From "before" ; before what I don't know exactly”.
As Mireille Rosello asks in her keynote address at the Incredibly Close and Extremely Slow international conference,‘what does it mean to slow down’? And suggested how slowness can be linked to exoticism and nostalgia which tends not to be an accepted part of the world of high-speed industry and technology. What would any of us feel if we were really faced with the reality of slowing down? There is also as was mentioned a banality and even boredom that comes with slowness. I am interested in this banality, this quietness, what happens when we just stop and sit with the camera and watch and listen and attempt to feel through the senses and the body? I am interested in the non-verbal; the bodily encounter and of this have brought me to phenomenological approach taken by Merleau Ponty and Levinas to an experiential practice.
In the films 'Moving Stills' within one four minute piece the emotions of the subject may be seen to change several times from contentment through to passivity, melancholia and detachment. It also seems that the close cropping of the portrait can act as a barrier, in some cases the closeness of face became impenetrable and kept the viewer at an emotional distance. There is a sense of never being able to fully define the other. That the portrait is always an attempt at understanding through the prism of subjective experience.
The desision to juxtapose and relate one film to the other was fulfilled in the instalation. The separation and splitting of the projections also sets up a narrative element to the pieces; it has emerged on bringing this to the public arena that the viewer immediately starts to build a story based on the visual information available. At the moment I am conducting a questionnaire in response to a installation of the film projections in a major gallery in Ireland.
The aim is to respond to the people and place in a tactile non-verbal way I am aware that this experiment opens more questions about subject position than it offers answers. Levinas philosophizes about the occurrence that happens in the face-to-face encounter – le visage dAutrui. The response, which is triggered, is of a primary language. One that triggers ethical responsibilities towards the face of the other.
Two experiences are transcribed here, one of an 'Autowalk' I took myself and one by Claire Louise Bennett of a nighttime walk we took together.
Auto walks – Sound piece and transcriptions.
The initial experiences of journeying through the place were my own autobiographical walks to sites, which are thick and embedded with memories and experiences. These involved two visits to different caravans which both held some uncomfortable memories for me. I took the conventional video camera with me, which presented some technical difficulties. This also triggered some uncomfortable sensations for me and I wondered if this kind of autobiography would have any wider significance or rigor within the context of the research, I constantly question how this subjective way of working might drift into unclear and vague territories. I decide that the experiments must be attempted with openness to the work being unsuccessful, that the qualitative nature of the research method should be attempted with an open hand.
One of my experiences is captured here: However it is only an initial investigation and cannot be included in the ‘Auto walks’ collected work ( relates to Auto walks sound piece in exposition) . It is not under the same remit extended to the individuals living in Cooloorta. I am required here to consider my own role as an outsider. To question my position in the methodology. This piece is an experiment to establish a form of walking and filming. It doesn’t have the immediacy of experience that is an important consideration in Auto walks. It is written in post experience to taking the walk rather than a direct interaction with the space. It written in the process of devising the Auto-walks but have different method.
