The film project uses the three substances, plastic, stone and water, as anchors to explore how we are laced in to materiality and simultaneously how our minds work – how thoughts proliferate, diverge and expand, as if yearning to escape the physical, and become digital, virtual. The title refers to Rock Paper Scissors, a game in which one idea affects the other, a pointless cyclical process. The film takes these ideas into the geological, ecological and political, as well as embodying subjectivity, instinctive currents and flows. 

My work spanned a period of time in both Dorset and Croatia, and on the internet, utilising the idea of an underlying geological connection between countries, through Portland stone and Brac Limestone. This notion launched an exploration of my own thoughts and thinking processes – via non linear video editing –  into language, ageing, money, death, time, oil, gravity……… The film’s format resembles a diaristic approach or essay, its form emerging to reflect a thinking process which is untamed, idiosyncratic and endlessly bifurcating. Rock Paper Scissors… 

“I began to be internal, encased in goggles, wetsuit, a snorkel, thinking, alone, swimming, underwater, unseen. interiority, the external, breathing. Observing thoughts and ideas accreting, my research, all the tangents, like barnacles settling and rooting on a surface. The strip of film between water and air revealing gravity. I grapple with the physical realities, the utter contradiction of ourselves as bodies in the world, the interconnectedness and the dissonances of what I think. Using the internet, imagining it as a collective (un)consciousness, our mind? My personal experience is elevated and obliterated. The camera lens in general and the digital screen in particular are our shields, obstacles, protectors. The camera has exploitative and stealing capacities, a possessing gaze. It colludes with us, we invented it. Capturing an instant, taking it out of context, labelling it, taking and giving meaning, re-presenting. There is also the problem of the screen, pixels, lcd, presenting the moving image. Film. I think of the surface of things, a film of oil, a delicate barrier. I can’t help but think of plastic, an extruded mineral layer, transparent as quartz, which light passes through.”

Plastic Water Stone is a single screen video film (22’22”).

It was produced after a KURS Artists and Writers Residency in Split, Croatia in 2017. 

Screenings:

Performance screening  with Chek Best as part of  KUDA IDEMO? (Where are we going?), Almissa Performance Art Festival, Omis, Croatia, 2019

Screening as part of Liquidscapes, Film Programme, Art.earth, Dartington, Devon,  2018

Arts Development Company

Article – “how to work internationally as an artist”

AIDF artists international’s development fund – British Council and Arts Council England funding for research, travel, filming on location in Croatia

Sandra Sterle, curator of Almissa 2019

watch here (email me for a password)