‘Requiem’ began as a memorial to my late husband, the writer and scholar David Brett but has now taken on more universal themes especially focusing on the nature of memory. We don’t remember in grand totals but in concrete details, in very precise sensations recalled which include noise, temperature, and the sense of our body in space, just as in dreams. These memories are often triggered by common place, everyday objects; they lead the way to the surreal, the metaphor, to feelings of both intimacy, loss and death.
I have been filming specific objects, a hand, a cup, a skull, with all their resonance of meaning, in different locations and in close details; these images are then layered with light and shadows to a point where the image almost becomes abstract. In the video I kept these images as stills to maintain their sense of quiet materiality.
The form uses a split screen, each half being very different, sometimes in a kind of duality or opposition and sometimes coming together later. The organising principle is that of contrasting sensations; one image butts up against another and the collision, complicated by changes of light and shadow imparts a third sensation. Both visuals and sound are kept slow and mediative.
My creative process is at first conceptual but then develops out of a response to the material generated. The mixture of elements, partly figurative, partly abstract explore time, memory and history, not in any objective way but in an attempt to locate them in a symbolic or metaphoric space that everyone can share.