Erin Siddall

Chris, film still, 16mm film, 3 minutes, black and white, silent, 2011. 

Swim,  film still, 16mm film, 3 minutes, black and white, silent, 2011. 

 

Deleuze and Guttari have described the process of working from a place of minority from within the dominant language available.  This concept can easily be transferred in terms of visual languages: expressing oneself in a language or framework in which there is  “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing …the impossibility of writing otherwise”.  The trilogy of films Mother Work, Chris and Swim continue my interest in the experience of a female working in a male-dominated medium, and with the potentially totalizing nature of the photographic apparatus such as camera lenses, tripods, or projector.  Imagery used was taken under the physical strain of the artist’s encounter with a heavy camera, limited available light, and spontaneous and intimate subject matter.  These limitations and fractured editing reflect the impossibility of the construction of memory, by another, or by oneself, and the difficulty of its portrayal through the language of photography.  Trilogy draws parallels between the physical experience of filming, the material labour of art-making, the physical and repetitive nature involved in (the subject of) a mother-child relationship, as well as the tactility of obsolete or nearly obsolete photographic practices.