Out With Mother, looped installation dvd (3 minutes) Wolverhampton University, 2006
Layered multiple images simultaneously show a mother out with her baby in a sling, a lonely figure of a woman on a beach and an almost invisible indexical shadow of a woman in a domestic space. These shadowy images are accompanied by a distorted sound loop of a child calling for his mother.
The video intentionally creates a disturbing tension to provoke questions about how mothers are represented, creating visual images that are simultaneously hauntingly distressing and mundane. The every day activity of walking out with baby is typically idealistically presented yet here it is distorted in order to create conversations about the real cost and experience of motherhood, and how to communicate its experience.
Make Light Work durational performance & film, Dartington Hall, 2002 parodied cultural narratives about women’s work as unimportant and shallow – or ‘light’. It aimed to create textual metaphors that visually and concretely contradict the notion of ‘lightness,’ and explore the darkness of motherhood.
I have often worked with performance films that are made over time as time-based works. They create dialogues between different media and differential relationships over time.
View other performances that made into film: Life Sentences A Walk with Jane Austen