Single channel video, looped
This is an excerpt of the looped video work "The Collapse", shown as part of the solo exhibition "This Fearsome Drop" at Stockroom Kyneton in March and April 2024.
The works in “This Fearsome Drop” became about resources, life-bearing, breathing, and standing on the precipice of climate catastrophe. Of the tension between the personal choices that we make in bringing children into the world, and the societal and global considerations and impacts of these choices.
“The Collapse” emerged from a deeply personal moment in the early months of my third pregnancy, as I experienced my growing belly in the weightlessness of water. By the time the work itself was filmed a few months later at six months pregnant (with the assistance of my partner/the baby’s father), the baby became part of the work, her movements creating ripples in the water in moments of stillness. I was struck by the abstract quality of the close-to-unmanipulated footage, of its ability to simultaneously reach across the minute scales of cells and the unfathomable size of astral bodies, and to speak to both rising sea-levels and the simple embodied experience of bathing when pregnant.
(At the exhibition opening, a friend told me that she read the work as feeling like the collapse of the self when giving birth and mothering, or the sublimation of self-into-baby-into-other. These readings also resonate strongly for me).
Technical assistance provided by Jem Selig Freeman.