This work, made over lockdown, focuses on a new mother as she breastfeeds her child over the first year of his life. A fixed frame film, the camera stays as still as its subject, as she voices various questions about her new role, maternal work, time, and her body through interviews made over the year. Here I focus on the lived experience of one mother, to reconceive the construction of maternity as completely innate, by presenting both maternal love, and maternal ambivalence.The film closes as the child feeds the mother, marking this time and particular embodied experience. For screenings please contact UAL Archives: archive-enquiries@arts.ac.uk
The rhythm of her movements, her heartbeat, her smell and her voice, mesh with the digitally produced sounds coming from her phone. This fusion of white noise and digital womb sounds and the embodied sensation of a mothers closeness and attention work together to settle the child to sleep. We watch in real time, as she finds a strategy which works to send her child to sleep.
‘In what language can one speak the effect of being silenced?’ (Elissa Marder)
Weaving a conversation between archaeological and psychoanalytical terminologies, here, the apple is an ‘active agent’ that haunts, and refers to buried trauma that travels through time and space. As the sharp needle point pushes into the flesh of the fruit, it pricks and hurts my fingers, and suggests the different kinds of pain that a desire to mend brings to the surface. The, ‘‘over and done with’ ‘demand a liberatory practice’, and, ‘something that acknowledges (them), that embraces the damage done’ (2013, Frosh, S). The sounds of slurping and crunching create an affective response in the audience, the unruly woman, who bites the apple, like Cixous Medusa, is laughing as she eats. Women’s laughter is often buried in everyday acts of refusal, and here it creates an archeological acoustics, through a stratigraphy of the feminine symbol.
A work in progress that seeks to capture the routine and practice of a group of female archers in London. The history of archery is richly bound up with the female body, female sexuality and power, reflected in both myth and contemporary histories. Archery is one of the most popular sports for women and was one of the first sports to include women in the modern Olympic Games in 1904. Equally popular today, perhaps inspired by Lara Croft and Katniss Everdeen, and the hunting Goddesses found in every part of the globe.
Often fashion subcultures that compel us in youth are forgotten as we get older, but Mike has carried forward a similar style for as long as he can remember. Fashion measures time, but the meanings assigned to our image can sometimes no longer translate as we age and the world changes around us. Mike stands out, but at the same time he has become invisible. Shot on the south coast of England, Mike is camouflaged in the landscape in which he lives. This film is a part of a larger photographic project which was featured in the Photoworks Annual 23 https://photoworks.org.uk/shop/photoworks-annual-issue-23-self-styled/
I contacted artist’s living and working in the Balfron Tower through Bow arts trust. Here the performance artist, Mette Sterre, talks about how it feels to live in the tower, and how it has influenced her work. Mette opens her first solo exhibition 'Sairagaz. Honey You'Re No Sea bunny' at The Joey Ramone Gallery Rotterdam.Mette opens her first solo exhibition 'Sairagaz.
I started to make portraits of the teenagers around me, as my own sons move from childhood into adulthood, I reflect on this through my ongoing project on London Teens. Vinnie talks about fashion, divorce, school and his life living in London.
I contacted artist’s living and working in the Balfron Tower through Bow arts trust. Here the artist, Paul Sakoilsky, talks about how it feels to live in the tower, and how it has influenced his work.
Graduation work made at LCC in 2011 which subsequently won and was collected by the Birth Rites collection for their yearly prize in 2012. I was present at the birth of a close friend’s daughter. Having had a miscarriage myself earlier in the year, I wanted to be at the birth, and being with her and witnessing the birth, was a catharsis of sorts. The image of the birthing body, and specifically an emerging ‘crowning’ baby, is life affirming and miraculous, yet it also disturbs and has been described as a site where the sublime and the abject meet. Using the video footage shot of my friend in childbirth, with permission, I invited people to view a four-minute edit, photographing portraits of them as they watched. Moved to express themselves in various ways, ranging through disgust, embarrassment and being moved to tears, the subjects became contemplative, giving them an air of Giotto’s sacred onlookers. Using birth videos found on YouTube, I layered an audio/video digital collage in After Effects. Played on a large screen, these women in active childbirth, are juxtaposed against the stillness of the portraits, their bodies create a centrepiece, and complete a triptych. Digital cameras and phones, allow people to view themselves in childbirth, or to watch on a screen images of their birth, could photographic images eventually alter the process of birth, and perceptions of self, altogether? As our world becomes increasingly virtual, does the corporeal become overwhelmingly ‘real’?
Contemporary discourse on the ‘maternal and the images which represent it, (remains) deeply incoherent’ (Tyler, I. 2009). The Birth Rites collection is now housed at the University of Kent, for enquiries https://www.birthritescollection.org.uk
The role of ritual in eating and the specifics of gender roles in public spaces are played out here. I employ the tropes of ethnographic film making to watch the process of waiting for, eating and completing a meal in a traditional greasy spoon in London. I am the artist waitress.
Roy Brown