Year of release: 2010
Original format: macro and microscopic digital photographs
Running time: 2min 30sec (loop)
Screening format: DVD
Credits: A film by Kayla Parker
Director/producer/animator: Kayla Parker
Production: Sundog Media
Distribution and sales: Sundog Media info@sundog.co.uk
Description
This practice-as-research mediates Luce Irigaray’s writing about the ‘feminine’ through close examination and ‘play’ with glass fragments found among the sand, pebbles, bladder wrack, and briny debris on Stonehouse Pool beach, Plymouth. Gathered intuitively, these objects are smoothed by the movements of the sea. Uncovered by the waves at low tide, the salty lozenges shine blue-white milk of magnesia, warm whey, pale colostrum, moss, strawberry juice, amber toffee, and clear hyacinth, in the low winter sunlight.
I locate materiality of memory, experience of place, and feminine pleasure in the liminal space of the strandline, between high and low water, at the intersection between the natural world and the urban environment. Through microscopic animation I manipulate the found objects to create a miniature ’looking glass’, a ‘poetic text’ through which I may find a place for language of the body. I film using macro photography, manipulating the tiny objects and the digital camera with my fingers: touch and sight intertwine as I feel my way through the camera’s miniature dance in embodied time and space.
Production notes
Nikon D300: 0.25 sec @ f8 high key / fine large jpg / 4288 x 2848 pixels; mounted on Neilson Hordell animation rostrum. Started filming midday Tuesday 2 February. Sound: the sea, Plymouth Sound.
“12.51pm move slowly west to east, head below the surface I can see the tiny bubbles caught within the glass, fin north to the bronze fragment and tread water above the ruby; then caught by the current I am swept along north east, before the tide carries me south to where I began.” Extract from production notes.
Publication and comments
BBC Devon: Plymouth exhibition focuses on time, place and memory Laura Joint (12 February 2010)
“My association of your film 'Glass' with the female body and to be accurate the vagina was quite startling. It felt celebratory, alive, pulsing, constructed of things strange yet familiar. The quality of the material with its softness was ultimately feminine and I sensed the presence of the female artist within the film. The movement moved me, and I reflected upon on this dark passage which came to mind. It was infused with light, warmth and life. I think of glass as inherently hard, sharp, easily shattered and able to draw blood and cause pain with the smallest of shards; indeed I associate the vagina with both life and death. Yet this glass reflected or moreover represented life - a woman's life. The passage of time on the beach had worn away danger and by its reduction had created a pleasing soft shingle. The shingle moves back and forth is both seen and unseen, still and in motion. It is manipulated and is an intersection between the natural - mother earth - and man's urban metropolis. As I watched the film and this part of the beach became woman - you! - a life force.”
Maggie Irving (2010) doctoral researcher, Faculty of Arts at University of Plymouth
Exhibition
2010
Radical British Screens Symposium: The moving image screen as a site of feminine pleasure paper, University of the West of England, Bristol (3 September 2010)
Finding Place, exhibition of recent work by research students in the Faculty of Arts, Scott Building, University of Plymouth, UK. Screened from looped DVD on monitor mounted on plinth (3 - 26 February 2010)
