The Tangle is a video film (13′) and project made for a commission from The University of Exeter, called Archipelagos of Knowledge, as part of the Arts and Culture Department in 2018.

With The Tangle, as with much of my work,  I make decisions based on chance coincidence and found material. I use these as ingredients to collage together something less like a traditional film and more like  a notebook, list or album. I find these in my house, on the sites and in the conversations. I am interested here in the binary opposition we see in relationships between two, how powerful it is an an idea, I want to subvert this. The university and the new town/housing development, higher education and domestic life. I wonder how we can change our thinking about knowledge. It is everywhere, not just in the university. The classification project of the 18th century and beyond is perhaps starting to crumble.  The hierarchy is a problem, do we now need to understand everything as connected?  The Rhizome. Archipelagos, each of us is an island of knowledge. I use the golden goose fairytale for its image of people becoming randomly connected together, following the gold (wealth – spiritual, intellectual or financial?), I also use the tale as a way of meeting some people, who then work with me. I explore this surreal and tangential crossing of subjects – the tale, the two places, formatting of knowledge, the collection of colonial trees on the campus, the idea of an underground tunnel, the function of the video equipment – camera, green screen, editing – all as very physical props – the artifice of making film as much a part of the project as the film. The brief asks a huge question, and the video aims to be a gesture rather than an answer.

2018

The Tangle (low res version)

www.artsandcultureexeter.co.uk