'From the fundamental forces that act on the physical world, to the strength of bonds between human beings, it is these invisible forces or bonds that hold us – as people, as families, as atoms and molecules.'
This piece by Sophie Clements caught my eye from the Harris Art gallery, I think maybe because I have a keen interest in instillation and film work at the moment. From just seeing the piece it can be quite challenging to realise what the art work was communicating. I got the idea that she was looking at single moments in time and slowing down the footage. When I got home I decided to look into her work and found that she was looking at the different forces that hold us together, not just the physical world but us as human beings. I liked this idea as I felt she was looking at the world in a more scientific way rather than an emotional one. Similar to what I wanted to portray in my work, taking the emotion and characteristic away from the beings and taking it back to basics, in more primitive times. I like the simplicity of the instillation piece and the idea of taking lots of shots in a short period of time from when the water balloon explodes to when it hits the floor. It's something we know is happening but we probably have never seen up close and as detailed before since the transition happens so quickly.
'Climbing Around My Room' 1993, Lucy Gunning
'A girl is in a bare room. She is moving, slowly and with visible effort, around the space. Her crimson gown, set against the white walls, stands out as a gash of red lipstick on a pale face. With animal agility, she circles the room, her naked feet never once touching the floor. She edges along the skirting-board and reaches an alcove ranked with shelves. She levers herself into the first of these deep crevices, rolling her body in, out, and up, to scale the wall. As impossible as a dream, Lucy Gunning’s videowork Climbing Round My Room (1993) has the intensity of a fantasy born from hours of idle introspection, alone in one’s bedroom. With its elusive goal, its protagonist’s extravagant exertions, her endless, rhythmic circling of the limits of the space, and her thorough exploration of the room’s secret nooks and crannies, it is difficult to resist interpreting the scene as a metaphorically sexual one: the body might be the bedroom, and the act, played by a solitary performer, auto-erotic. This is not to reduce the piece to crude symbolism or to sexual theatre (although, with its emphasis on real time and energy, Climbing Round My Room is related to physical theatre) but to try to account for its strangely arresting effect. Gunning’s scenario describes something precarious and pleasurable, something dangerously yet delicately achieved. It is an image of excess, an enactment of desire in a landscape at once known and unknown. If, for Lacan, Bernini’s enrapt Saint Theresa represented the unrepresentable, a moment of jouissance frozen in stone, then Gunning’s video suggests jouissance not as one (or even many) particular moments, but as a psychic event played out in a cycle of perpetual, physical, motion.'
In the early hours of the morning, as a nightclub winds down somewhere in London, the room is pierced with the extraordinary sounds of high-pitched neighing. The lights go up, but the horse impersonator is gone. Lucy Gunning, haunted by the noise, resolves to find her. She takes out ads in newspapers, pins up notices in colleges, stables, community centres, asks around. The woman is not found. But, unexpectedly, many others come forward. For the horse impersonator is not unique in her passions.
Gunning visits and films these subjects, and compiles a video of their collected impressions. Though their solitary practice might appear comic, a harmless hobby, it quickly becomes apparent that this is no simple enthusiasm.
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