‘The narrative comes from the location, our connection to the space that we’re filming in. …The narrative, if you can call it that, is something that comes from within the actual place that we’re examining’.1
Jane & Louise Wilson on their projected film installation Stasi City
These clips are moving-image works for an installation at Peninsula Arts, University of Plymouth, 2nd-5th November 2009. While looking at space and light in architecture for my MA, I was offered the opportunity of a residency with the National Trust at Barrington Court in Somerset. Whilst filming, I tried to discern something coming from the place itself, letting what is there ‘be’; let the silent narrative which has always been there, unseen and unspoken, become manifest. These works are a result of my collaboration.
Cultural history establishes Barrington Court as an iconic, idealised dwelling place, but power structures inevitably change and the house has been reinvented as a heritage site. This shift in purpose and meaning combined with the aesthetics of space, are an appropriate context for my work in questioning our place and meaning in the world. As we increasingly inhabit what seems to be an eBased, iLife, (the one you now inhabit in cyber-space), there is a blurring of our real and virtual boundaries, between the mental and physical space we inhabit. A dialectics of interior and exterior offers a critique of established dualisms and from a psychoanalytic perspective, Teresa Brennan explains how the environment literally ‘gets into’ the individual via biochemical and physical energies, ‘…the transmission of affect means that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies. There is no secure distinction between the individual and the environment’.2
As Barrington Court can be considered a historical ‘dwelling place’ re-interpreted towards a contemporary ‘thinking space’, so the structure of the installation offers metaphorical potential for the medium of film (in time) and projection (in space). However, while powerful, multivalent metaphors can be symbolic, David Punter counters, ‘…the dividing line between the metaphorical and the symbolic is tentative and shifting’. (Punter 2007: 30)3 4
As we hover between knowing and doubt in a liminal state - we are always on the threshold; psychologically semi-paralysed, half-blind, half-seen, only partly-aware, gazing through transparent folded windows, looking for something to connect to, just for a moment, something to solidify - to justify our seemingly isolated existence – we are always seeking beauty. We find paradox, a Droste effect, an endless hermeneutic, a recursive mirror for the mind, but sometimes in abstract visions, in moments we might sense infinity - when our personal boundaries momentarily melt, and we dissolve into the all of nothingness. As Ruskin put it, ‘Infinity. It is of all visible things the least material, the least finite, the farthest withdrawn from the earth prison house, the most typical of the nature of God…’.5 6
