secret river |
Optical collage, Animation, video, photographs, 2024 -
Start from a single point, a compass point if you will. An imaginary direction tugged along magnetic latitudes, longitudes, ley lines, fault lines, boundary lines. Imagine moving outwards to create a web of connections, possibilities and imaginary landscapes. Then write in the everyday through tiny details of lists and aspirations and root it to denote a sense of home. Any home. The river flows through – a real and imagined current that connects homelands and memories. A shifting expanse, changing context and geographies but one that is the secret channel to imaginary lands. I imagine the river as a vein, the lifeblood of our essential self that looks for eddies and streams that branch into the act of claiming spaces. A further punctuation in the idea of identity and belonging. Pages from ‘found books’ become scored with ink blots and paint, snippets of drawings emerge and disappear, charcoal rivers blend with real rivers and pencil lines and grocery lists and crows and landscapes all blend into a mesmeric journey. This video work was made during a residency at the Royal College of Art, London in 2024. I spent my time during the residency at the RCA ruminating on the idea of home, belonging and identity, thinking of ‘being away’ and what that may mean in various contexts and trying to chart a path that looks outwards at the larger implications of ‘away’. Who becomes a ‘migrant’, a ‘settler’ or remains a ‘traveller’? What are the things that help ground us, whatever and wherever we are? Bringing in the familiar and the mundane, I explore the potential of various acts of claiming spaces. I created a body of work in which this video features. In this body of work I use my grandmother’s meticulous grocery lists as the spine that holds together the fragments of images, spaces, places and things that I have collected – ranging from archival photographs both from my family archive and random e-bay purchases, to wooden boxes, scavenged old books, magazines and photocopies. This material is then filtered through interventions and interpolations in the darkroom, in pencil, paper, paint and moving image to present an evolving atlas of ‘belonging’. |