Women of Vision

ILLIYANA NEDKOVA explores the provocative work of a group of women artists featured in the Invisible Fields exhibition at An Tuireann in Skye

AS JEANNETTE WINTERSON says, “Women, women, everywhere and not a man in sight”, but if you are looking for overt signs of feminism you won’t find them in Invisible Fields – a selection of artists’ films, videos and installations featuring the work of twelve women artists. Guided by ‘group interaction and feedback rather than control and determinism’, the selection was executed by two of the exhibiting artists, Sarah Felton and Su Grierson.

It is a timely reminder that, as they point out, ‘women artists were, and still are, under-represented within the art world’, and echoes the pioneering activist strategy of the creative collective Guerrilla Girls, dubbed ‘conscience of the art world’ and famous for wearing short skirts, net stockings, high heels and gorilla masks. In 1988, Guerrilla Girls issued one of their public service messages, The Advantages of Being A Woman Artist, citing among others: ‘Working without the pressure of success. Not having to be in shows with men. Being included in revised versions of art history. Not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius’.

Artificial Paradise by Victoria Clare Bernie

Drawing on such advantages Invisible Fields also summons those undetectable forces, which enable individual acts and seemingly insignificant events to inform a wider, even globally-valid worldview. With humour, critical attitude and promiscuity in various media, these women of vision are finding an entire world ‘in a grain of sand’ (William Blake) or ‘unweaving the rainbow’ (Richard Dawkins) to its colour spectrum, thus offering us brief fragments of reality – all pulled together by the strings of the artist-puppeteers.

“Miles away from the super-slick world of Pixar and Disney lies the kind of experimental animation made by Maria Doyle.”

Victoria Clare Bernie’s Artificial Paradise could be interpreted alongside Walt Whitman’s: ‘I believe that a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars’.  Many a blade of grass, illuminated by the fine pigments of the night sky, make up Bernie’s cinematic garden, perhaps an equivalent of an ambient music piece crossed with a serene landscape painting. Is it the wind howling and the seabirds flocking, or the night in the wake of a storm? Rather a slice of the microcosm, a form of microclimate, asserts the artist, with imagined topographies and invented soundscapes.

Samantha Clark’s Trying to Come Home is a light and sound installation where the sense of invasion of homing pigeons is overwhelmingly Hitchcock-esque. The sound endlessly circles a room with walls of lace curtains and a light source coming from a single light bulb in the middle. With an economy of digital means, i.e. with no projector, the sound creates gentle ripples in the air as if projecting lace-patterned, moving shadows onto the solid walls around.  While capturing the nostalgia of being away from home and the reality of where home is, Clark also alerts us to the fact the homing pigeons magnetic sense is increasingly jeopardized by the mobile phone masts on their route.

Miles away from the super-slick world of Pixar and Disney lies the kind of experimental animation made by Maria Doyle. Her hand-crafted, watercolour animation often appearing alongside her drawings as in El Bruc is more reminiscent of the style of artist William Kentridge. Kentridge’s characters are drawn from his own experience of growing up in South Africa and so are Doyle’s: ‘I wanted the animated film to act as a visual diary of my artist’s residency in Barcelona.’ Baffling at times, Doyle’s characters morph into each other. A woman becomes a man becomes a she-wolf becomes the sun becomes a tree. As if washed away they slowly disappear like distant reveries.

“‘What transforms darkness into light? Godard’s Constantine is asked, ‘La poesie’, the computer replies.”

Sarah Felton’s hauntingly cinematic Thin Air opens with a cascade of seemingly unrelated images of woodland, motorway, flat’s interior – all seen through the blurry filter of someone’s weathering life. The soundtrack mixes black bird and baby crying; a hissing noise and a melancholic voiceover. Together with the choice of black and white footage, this powerful opening gradually brings more darkness and ‘a space to think’ about bereavement and loss in sync with the cold, winter sun. A close up of a dying elderly man’s face serves as a parting shot only to be overtaken by the another, double finale.

My Blue Heaven by Su Grierson

Most of Belinda Gaudi’s work seem to bear the aura of Jean-Luc Godard’s cult film Alphaville. Helsinki sets out to recreate some of the film transcripts and scenes, complete with the prevalent nocturnal or claustrophobically indoors locations. Paris of 1965, i.e. the land of Alphaville, however is Helsinki of 2002 and the two actors Gaudi casts are perhaps only rising stars. It is rather ironic that the artist is paying her homage to the celebrated enfante terrible of the nouvelle vague using the means of the desktop computer film-making while Godard’s thesis is against technological totalitarianism. ‘What transforms darkness into light? Godard’s Constantine is asked, ‘La poesie’, the computer replies.

In My Blue Heaven Su Grierson rolls up the fairground spectacle with the equally manufactured reality of the wild west, the digitally collaged photographic print with the looped moving image. The knotted forests and the red sky blazing over snowy mountains are all deceptively authentic if it wasn’t for the iconic cowboy rider and his lady whose white horse seems to be borrowed from the fair roundabout set and grounded to a halt on stilts. As previously in her work Grierson uses landscape art and environmentalist aesthetics, this time to communicate how our relationship with the land, the remote and the rural is driven by frontier myths, escapism and thrills, not unlike in the pleasure lands of the fair.

“In their video works and performances Jeanette Sendler and Anna Coccidiaferro aka Metacorpus often resort to theatrical allegories to convey visions of our bodies’ fallability and fragility.”

Anne Bjerge Hansen’s video Interludes have been described as ‘a visual index of haunting and ephemeral moments’ (Steven Bode). Alternating between staged and almost documentary approach, silence or sound recorded on location, these episodes unfold the narrative of the serendipitous and the elusive as being captured by Hansen’s camera since 1997. The rolling of the ‘finest pork sausage’; a pack of pet dogs streaming on and on through the park gates; a flock of swans marvelling at their cousin of sorts out for a walk – an wooden toy of a duckling on a pulley – hundreds of such fragmented testimonials ascribing significance and extraordinariness to a picturesque world witnessed or prompted by the artist.

Jane McInally takes the double-entendre of the title Still Life to connect the world of art history with the patterns emerging from everyday routines such as walking the dog. McInally’s camera seems as if set on auto record as soon as it detects the lady and her dog out on their daily trip to the park for a ball game. Employing the classic viewpoint of video art – shooting the street life from above, possibly a window in one’s flat – this observational piece is also appealing as a multi-channel, hierarchy-free installation. In rain or sunshine, with the dog in or out of frame, and the old lady in various outfits, Still Life is also about the repetitive, almost unchanging flow of life.

Breath Hold by Susannah Silver

In their video works and performances Jeanette Sendler and Anna Coccidiaferro aka Metacorpus often resort to theatrical allegories to convey visions of our bodies’ fallability and fragility. In both Sound and Suspension and Animated Body Apendages, the artists trust their skills of costume designers to choreograph an epic about the human form creating an inspiring piece of dance video. Throbbing electronica, slow motion, acts of suspension and flying eventually pan across an elaborate costume-clad dancer in search of the mechanics of the ear and the emotional aspects of foetal hearing.

“Fusing data from 3D model bodily scans and photographic images with 3D animation techniques, allows for the seamless merge of reality and artifice.”

Not unlike her other award-winning artist’s films Rosalind Nashashibi’s The State of Things is predicated on an interest in the invisible, non-newsworthy big issues of the day. With an air of investigative tenacity and an eye for the non-exotic, Nashashibi records her passage through the subcultures of the world. The State of Things is an encounter with the underbelly of budget economy. The artist’s use of grainy, black and white imagery of a contemporary flea market coupled with an archival recording of an Egyptian diva is disorientating at first yet evocative of the overlapping of East and West, affluence and poverty, Glasgow and Cairo, now and then.

Susannah Silver’s Breath Hold could equally be associated with birth and death, with primeval water and scientific enquiry. Structured in 20 seconds sequences of diving in and out of a pool, Silver’s video poem mirrors the time our instinctive reflex to breathe kicks in. Shot exclusively under water, the work is visually enchanting in its attempt to give 20 seconds’ fame to the formally-dressed divers, dancing away in mock-synchronous swimming style. The barely audible, casual conversation about the discomfort of giving birth or is it about dying is engulfed by graceful weightlessness, air bubbles and splashing of water.

Susan Sloan’s animated digital short Figure in Motion is only one in a series of artist’s studies in how we move around. Three steps at a time is our walking stripped to its basic ingredients, reveals Sloan’s research. The eerie, luminous figure with the ghostly golden glow who takes those steps, centre-stage on the screen, is one of us but slightly digitally manipulated, reassures the artist. Fusing data from 3D model bodily scans and photographic images with 3D animation techniques, allows for the seamless merge of reality and artifice. What if our bodies are no longer shaped by biology alone or by cosmetic surgery, but by humans or artists using new technologies to determine its features, contours and shapes?

What will govern our choice in the future and who will be the next generation of visionary women to enchant us with their stories of tomorrow’s everyday, is yet to be revealed. What is clear now is that you won’t need to be a feminist, nor even a cyberfeminist, to enjoy Invisible Fields. You have to, however, love short movies with high-minded seriousness and a touch of light-hearted humour.

Iliyana Nedkova is a Sofia-born Edinburgh-based curator and critic of contemporary art and design. Currently she is working on her PhD in Curatorial Theory and Practice at Liverpool John Moores University. Iliyana is also serving as Honorary Cultural Attaché at the Bulgarian Consulate in Scotland. Together with Chris Byrne, she is a founding Co-Director of ARC: Art Research Communication.

Invisible Fields is showing at An Tuireann on Skye from 15 January 2005.

© Iliyana Nedkova, 2005