I am an artist and my work is engaged in portraiture in film and video. I have a background in painting which also feeds into the concerns of the moving image work, that of the role of lived relations in the formation and intersections of subjectivities.
My work is a personal cinema arising out of the traditions of experimental film, focusing on the lived relationships between people and structures. My experimental mode explores the form and visual textures of video (through different generations of the camera, from lo fi to high-end cameras). Adopting DIY approaches and disjunctive and collage-like aesthetics from punk and post-punk, I aim to transform the impoverished image into a rich, multi-layered enjoyment of the visual.
Through the fractured rhythms of editing, juxtapositions of textures (hand-held, fixed shots, blurred and distinct images), and a plasticisation of the image through emphasis on colour and slowed-down film, my work combines found footage and montaging techniques with first person testimony. My use of these elements, my debt to twentieth century montage and the cut-up makes my work visually bold but not slick. I juxtapose this punk approach to production with a feminist-humanist documentary ethos: namely, to discreetly and sensitively bring the viewers’ attention to the difficulties, pressures, schisms and, ultimately, the potential for healing that comes out of negotiating different communities and identities. I am particularly interested in the relationships between insider and outsider perspectives, and how class, race and gender, as well as geography, politics and institutional memory shape and unshape personal identity.
My work derives its authority from the chorus of voices it simultaneously assembles – and disassembles. As such, my work is a felt archaeology of place and the body, which lays bare the natural awkwardnesses and contradictions of the marginalised, everyday voices of people that I invite to tell their stories with deadpan humour, irreverence and poignancy. In this, these suites of practice, evolving over lengthy time periods, affirm the right to self-inconsistency that is a constitutive part of our lived experience.