I am currently developing a new video work for a show at Globe Gallery, North Shields. Preparation began last week and the work is now being composited in Adobe After Effects by Andrzej Wojtas, who recently edited my fulldome work Continuum. The installation in the gallery consists of rear-projection onto 5' 5" diameter circular screen with a custom built frame by William Oliver & Rodman Russel Ltd. The construction of the circular steel frame is based on the design of an embroidery ring. The work will open next Thursday (17th June) at the gallery, which is located on Howard Street, North Shields. Click here for directions
The work is an outcome from the Mutations project, which looks at traditional notions of beauty, which are often bound up with balance, order and harmony. Alongside this, it considers imperfection, difference the struggle to 'fit', whether physically or psychologically. The ideas that developed out of the various periods of research - however abstracted and ambiguous - deal with transformation of self, image, identity and the potential beauty in imperfection and difference. Changeling, the new work in development for Globe gently approaches some of these ideas.
In Western European mythology a Changeling is the child of a fairy, troll, elf or other mythological creature left behind in place of a human child that has been taken. The term 'Changeling' came to represent the unknown in medieval literature, often being used to describe children with unidentified physical or mental disease or illness.
The research, which fed ideas into the development of the project looked at several very different tranformative processes. During the residency with the MRC Virology Unit I spent time observing the potential and often devastating method by which a virus particle enters and appropriates the human body at a cellular level. The virus manipulates our biology to gain an advantage, every part of the cell structure is utilised in the production of new virus progeny. In contrast, my time in rural Allenheads during the Base Elements residency led me to look at the alchemical opus and the quest for perfection though the transmutation of base metals into gold. Gold has a complex and conflicting role in the mythology of many cultures and still reflects ideas of status. It has been used to symbolise idolatry and the divine, a blessing and a curse.
In the work the body has been altered both physically and through digital editing becoming a hybrid of both traditional and contemporary notions of beauty, perfection and their opposites. We recognise the tail, a symbol of difference, a psychological manifestation, a mutation or a myth? In the early stages of development human embryos develop tail structures however, these recede and though there have been claims, there are no recorded instances of a human child being born with a tail. When ideas emerged for the prosthetic tail I was interested in this idea of an impossible mutation, a representation of the unseen, a physical projection of the unconscious, also a possible bringer of balance.
