2010

 

ëmotion

ëmotion

 

Georgia O Keefe
“Where I was born and where or how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.”

 

This journey.
This journey continues.
This journey ends.
Mine was short but the terrain lingered. I have continued my tracks from the last short film 18 degrees tender geography 46 degrees still dragging my footsteps through this cathartic landscape unable to stop until this tsunami of emotive terrain is passed - like two express trains racing to unknown destinations.

 

I wanted to merge places that are miles apart but share the same beauty of the ocean – savage though it may be. As Susan Sontag wrote:

“Photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are”

 

I wanted to convey the ‘dark side’ of the seaside something that is still evident in European coastal places though the wars are both distant and relatively recent. Water may cleanse the wounds but there is always the memory of these past occurrences. It brings to mind the beaches of Normandy or some remote Greek island their present beauty was once stained by the blood of men fighting in war. When recently visiting Dubrovnik in Croatia I was constantly reminded of the bitter conflict of the 1990s and it’s still evident destruction – shrapnel in houses by the harbour, buildings decimated and simply left, no ownership, nobody there, just forgotten.
Ghosts. 
To return to this terrain and merge it with my imaginary terrain is a cathartic journey – this is only a one way ticket – move though and move on.
I have incorporated photographic, film images, photocopies, drawings and ideas from Diggers & Dubrovnik and tried to capture both beauty, atmosphere and emotion, as Sontag said “A way of certifying experience”

We all enjoy gazing out to sea but what or how do we feel when others are looking from the ocean back at us? The simple fishing boat or the boat with machine guns? It is perhaps that what lies hidden that worries us the most.  I was interested in combining dance movement with oceanic notation – worm lines, crab tracks, dragged  driftwood lines, lines on the bark of trees, lines on the rocks – were they a notation of their own - ? Installing my previous work with its dance lines merging it with the movement notation on the beach at Diggers.  The movement lines and swirls made by my feet in moving in the sand compared to the swirls on my installation sheet – dancing – moving – e-motion. The shadows that dance, both literally and metaphorically, or the ones thrown by nature itself seem to tell stories.
 E-motion – a moving force from the Latin ‘emovere’ to move and ‘e’ meaning out.

 

Sontag writes:

“All photographs are memento mori
To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”

 

She talks about slicing out this moment and freezing it.

 “All bodies that move rapidly appear to inscribe their trajectory with a trace of their own colourful texture”
Leonardo da Vinci.

 

Through this filmic experience I will take the viewer to a terrain that may be familiar or not – a journey.