Maddog

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OMELAS----

WHAT Omelas is a 7 minute video with ambient sound and a static camera angle. It is set in an old ruin of a cottage, tucked away in native shrubbery by Port Willunga, a beach in South Australia. During the video, ten clones of the same naked figure sway, twitch, and climb pathetically over the ruin. There is no event - nothing really happens.

HOW With the camera rolling, (and my mum standing guard), I enacted the central character. I climbed over the ruin and performed different actions - jerking and twitching, but always in a squat position. In post-production, the video is layered ten times.

WHY

The work responds to Ursula Leguin’s short story The ones who walk away from Omelas, which describes a mythic utopia whose existence is wholly reliant on the suffering of one small boy, dungeoned in an excremental cellar below the city. The tale is perhaps a metaphor for the ill-begotten Others whose unseen suffering enables the wealthy both leisure and a clear conscience. It is this boys movements that I have tried to imagine, and then reenact.

---COLOSSAL SLIP---

WHAT Colossal slip is a large hanging abstract and amorphous blob. It resembles something between a floating mass and bodily organ. On the surface it is white, shiny and rough, with eight openings that have been closed with silver sequined fabric. Within, an intermittent drum beat sound makes the sculpture lightly vibrate.

HOW This work is set on a large wooden frame that is approximately two meters tall, and 1.5 meters diameter, at its widest. It is covered in mesh, paper mache, then plaster and enamel. Three drums are fixed inside, and an Arduino has been programmed to create a random beat that outlasts the sculptures exhibition lifetime. The sculpture is then hung centrally within an exhibition space.

WHY Colossal Slip is a non categorizable thing that could resemble many things. It's voice permeates the space, filling the gallery with aeonic sound, creating something akin to a Deleuzian non pulsed time. The unending sound ties other works together, creating an overall environment and immanence throughout the show.

---NUPTA CONTAGIOSO---

WHAT In this video, the central figure raises a dead blue-throated wrasse lovingly and carefully to her face, where she continues to hold it for the duration of the 3.30 minute work. Additional fish spring from mid air, and begin to swim around her in circles. They slowly multiply until she is engulfed or swallowed by more than 50 circling wrasse. The camera is static and the sound track is ambient.

HOW I held the fish to my face for an extended period of time; this was a performance to camera and formed the bottom layer of the video. Later, I threw the same fish gently up and down in front of a green screen. In post production, I chose about 25 appropriate tosses, isolated frames from the arc of the throw, chroma-keyed out the green and multiplied the resulting frames over and over to create the air-bound fish-flight.

WHY Nupta contagioso is Latin for marriage with the diseased, or conjugation with a corpse. Etruscans once used this as torture method so that the worms of the dead would fuse it with the body of the living. In the work, the coupling is not a self-torture however, instead it produces a kind of animistic or sympathetic magic: air becomes water, and the performer becomes animal. The work inverts and plays with Bataille's claim that “Animals are in the world, as water is in water” - here, the performer shares an immanence with a school of waterless fish.