The film project uses the three substances, plastic, stone and water, as anchors to explore how we are laced in to materiality and simultaneously how the mind works – the process of thinking, bifurcation, neuro-divergencies. I explore how thoughts can proliferate, diverge and expand, as if yearning to escape the physical, and become digital, virtual. The imagination as the ultimate VR. The title refers to Rock Paper Scissors, a game in which one action affects the other, proceeding as a pointless fun cycle. The film takes these ideas into the geological, ecological and political, as well as embodying subjectivity, instinctive currents and flows. The edit timeline is the storyboard as sketchpad, where the film is written and directed.
My work spanned a period of time in both Dorset and Croatia, and on the internet, utilising the idea of an underlying geological connection between countries, through Portland stone and Brac Limestone. This notion launched an exploration of my own thoughts and thinking processes – via non linear video editing – into language, ageing, money, death, time, oil, gravity……… The film’s format resembles a diaristic approach or essay, its form emerging to reflect a thinking process which is untamed, idiosyncratic and endlessly bifurcating.
“I began to be internal, encased in goggles, wetsuit, a snorkel, thinking, alone, swimming, underwater, unseen. A terrible interiority, tugged by the external, breathing. Observing thoughts and ideas accreting, my research, all the tangents, like barnacles settling and rooting on a surface. The strip of film between water and air revealing gravity. I grapple with the physical realities, the utter contradiction of ourselves as bodies in the world, the interconnectedness and the dissonances of what I think. Using the internet, imagining it as a collective (un)consciousness, our sort of mind. Subjective experience is elevated and obliterated. The camera lens in general and the digital screen in particular are our shields, both obstacles and protectors. The camera has exploitative and stealing capacities, a possessing gaze. It colludes with us, we invented it. Capturing an instant, taking it out of context, labelling it, taking and giving meaning, re-presenting. There is also the problem of the screen, pixels, lcd, presenting the moving image. Film. I think of the surface of things, a film of oil, a delicate barrier. I can’t help but think of plastic, an extruded mineral layer, transparent as quartz, which light passes through.”
Details
Single screen video film (22’22”).
Date:
2017/2021
Locations:
Marjan Park-Forest, Split, and Jadran Kamen Quarry, Brac, Croatia
Osmington, Kimmeridge and Portland, Dorset, UK.
The City of London, UK.
Acknowledgements:
KURS Artists and Writers Residency , Split, 2017.
The Artists International Development Fund, British Council and Arts Council England, 2018
Maja Vrancic, Dan Oki and Sandra Sterle, Arts Academy of the University of Split, Branko Franceschi and staff at Galerija Umjetnina.
KUDA IDEMO? (Where are we going?), Almissa Performance Art Festival, Omis, Croatia, 2019
Liquidscapes, Film Programme, Art.earth, Dartington, Devon, 2018
Archive
Arts Development Company Article – “how to work internationally as an artist”
watch PWS (email me for password)
Short edit of clips from PWS duration 5′