research
Visualizing Utopia?
Experiential research on collective experience of place.
Practice based research – National College of Art and Design, Dublin
This practice based research explores the representation of a 'utopian' community in the west of Ireland. 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.
Experiential research on collective experience of place.
Practice based research – National College of Art and Design, Dublin
This practice based research explores the representation of a 'utopian' community in the west of Ireland. 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
In depicting the others corporeality I realize that the very notion of a ‘relationship’ depends completely on its reciprocality. There is no other face without my encounter and there is no ‘I’ to take the photograph without the relation to the other. I attempt to find an understanding of myself through these filmic interactions with my subjects. All the while taking account that the notion of a self as an individual has been criticized as existentially romantic and claims for authenticity remain outmoded and the site of criticism with poststructuralist and postmodern schools of thought. So any attempt to create description or a personal testimony remains tenuous. That is what as an artist I want to do, to represent, to express, and this notion by its nature will always be subject to the eye of the other. I suggest that there is a great circularity here – my attempt to be honest in taking account of the other also means having to take account my own position – something which is not always clear until I let the work go out to an audience. It seems that the moment the work is “fixed” is the very moment when the work has failed. It is that transient, temporality which I am fleetingly trying to capture. 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 decision to play with setting two pieces off against each other came from the idea of setting up a context between portrait and place. For example the portrait of my mother set against the Moving Still of the makeshift toilet/tarpaulin structure: (which had been the place she had spoken of in her initial conversations and walks in Cooloorta). This splitting also set 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 questionaire in response to a instalation of the film projections.
'Shared vision or singular experience? – Mapping identity through experiential research, multiple voices reflecting on their relationship to place'
This work explores questions to do with fragility of shelter in a post ‘new age settlement.’ I am in the process of researching how multiple, experiential accounts can form a mapping process, which reflects on place. The research interacts with the text Giving an Account of Oneself by Judith Butler in which she examines the reciprocal nature of subject formation and proposes that there is no ‘I’ without the Other and that as we come into being we only define ourselves as ‘I’ through our formative relationships. Any attempt to give an account of oneself becomes problematic, fragmented and open to questioning. Butler proposes that stories must be told and accounts must be given, but with an open awareness to their fictional and subjective nature. The notion is to capture the exchange in the boundary between the individual’s physical body and the environment that surrounds it and to gather non-narrative pieces of video as experimental research. Each piece will be like a route/ road/ drift that will form series of ‘auto walks’.
The portraits are a document to the individuals taking part in this project. The beginning of experiments in a reciprocal portrait making in which I attempt to explore the distance between myself and the other as part of an autobiographical dialogue with ‘our’ relationship to the place.
This work explores questions to do with fragility of shelter in a post ‘new age settlement.’ I am in the process of researching how multiple, experiential accounts can form a mapping process, which reflects on place. The research interacts with the text Giving an Account of Oneself by Judith Butler in which she examines the reciprocal nature of subject formation and proposes that there is no ‘I’ without the Other and that as we come into being we only define ourselves as ‘I’ through our formative relationships. Any attempt to give an account of oneself becomes problematic, fragmented and open to questioning. Butler proposes that stories must be told and accounts must be given, but with an open awareness to their fictional and subjective nature. The notion is to capture the exchange in the boundary between the individual’s physical body and the environment that surrounds it and to gather non-narrative pieces of video as experimental research. Each piece will be like a route/ road/ drift that will form series of ‘auto walks’.
The portraits are a document to the individuals taking part in this project. The beginning of experiments in a reciprocal portrait making in which I attempt to explore the distance between myself and the other as part of an autobiographical dialogue with ‘our’ relationship to the place.
