picture box

This experimental digital video originates from a walk with the artist’s mother whose life has changed since the onset of Parkinson’s disease. picture box is an attempt to encounter some of the physical and emotional dynamics of human experience and to explore the ways in which one might try to locate oneself in relation to such a paradoxical ‘space in-between’.

The video engages with a poetic visual language to evoke reflections on ‘the fear of the other within us’ (Cristofovici, 1999) as we age and encounter experiences of illness and disease. The starting point is auto-biographical, drawing on original sound and film/video footage from personal archives. The process of editing/montage is used to interrupt and to intervene in a natural sequence of events, to create a story that reveals a disrupted body, an ‘other than me’ (Toombs, 1993). Repeated sections of film, reversal, changes in duration and slow changes in perspective through sound and image are employed to reflect upon a shift in the temporal dimension brought about by illness and the separation from a hitherto familiar place.

References:
Cristofovici, A. 1999. ‘Touching Surfaces: Photography, Aging, and an Aesthetics of Change’. In K. Woodward, ed. ‘Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations’. Indiana University Press, 1999, p286-287.
Toombs, S.K. 1993.’The meaning of illness: a phenomenological account of the different perspectives of physician and patient’. Amsterdam: Kluwer.