Getting to know someone is a game of discovery.
We ask them to take us to where they like to go, to show us their spaces. We look around and try to guess what they see, how they see. The places they frequent, the objects significant to them, these offer us a glimpse into their lives, snippets of their story. This is our opportunity to explore their world.
I spy with my little eye….
Disequanimity, 2022. Digital print on fabric, 1.4 m x 1.4 m, single channel video projection.
Disequanimity is an emotional response. It is the flux of emotions, the way in which emotion can bleed through and define state of mind. It’s the feeling of a glitch in the psyche, the absence of stability, of balance, of equanimity.
I wanted to work with my own body to create a somewhat autobiographical work. The self-portrait was intended to capture myself as possibly only I see myself, the physical representation of the self pared back to its most fundamental, best described by the following:
“Photographing oneself is the closest one can get to trapping the image that looks back from the mirror.” – Frances Borzello [1]
I’m inspired by surrealist artist Claude Cahun and how she used her own body in a variety of compositions, simple and complex, to explore identity and representation. The materiality of the work, fabric and projection, was inspired by a work by Canada based New Zealand Artist Miranda Smitheram, Macro/Micro_Whakapapa, 2019. I have also drawn on the history of self-representation and self-identification though self-portraits, in particular by women, informed by the book “Seeing-ourselves: Women’s Self Portraits by Frances Borzello.
[1] Frances Borzello, “The Nineteenth Century: The Opening Door,” in Seeing Ourselves : Women’s Self-Portraits (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016), 137.
FINAL_project1_image_reshuffle_2percent_Crop.mp4
Video: documentation_20220912_edit_v1.mp4
