Scar;
Nude with Mirror
Performance-film
Super-8mm colour/black and white film 8’27” silent, 1993
edit to
HD video, 2021
Performance: 20’
Location: Oxford
Scar is a moving image work made from a performance to Super-8mm film. I carefully wash the scar at my ankle with bars of soap crafted with scalpel blades deeply inserted, making them slippery and dangerous to handle. In the digital edit I superimpose the more ghostly black and white films with the colour. A compositional structure is imposed on the material so that the more ghostly black and white film dominates then recedes in equal measures of time from start to finish, in contrast to the colour film. The action performed is lonely, repetitive, simple yet uncertain and precarious. The space is dark, domestic, interior and claustrophobic. Scar is about the desire to impose control on events which are out of our control, and aims to heighten these feelings in its accompanying silence.